Author: Adam Lee

For my northern hemisphere readers, the full flush of summer has arrived. In honor of the season, I’ve picked an appropriate poem for this installment of Poetry Sunday: the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ idyllic, evocative hymn to nature and childhood, “Fern Hill”, from his 1946 collection Deaths and Entrances. Born in 1914, Dylan Thomas was…

One of the most persistent misconceptions about atheism is that, if there is no supernatural soul and human beings are made merely of atoms and molecules, then our lives would be deprived of meaning. Asserts Christian apologist Phil Fernandes: If atheism is true, then man is mere molecules in motion. He has no greater value…

Out of Toronto, this jaw-dropping story: Colleen Leduc, a local mother, was accused by school officials of letting her autistic daughter Victoria be sexually abused – based on the word of a psychic! (HT: Boing Boing). Leduc’s weird tale began on May 30, when she dropped young Victoria off for class at Terry Fox Elementary…

While reading Richard Sloan’s book Blind Faith, I came across a passage that jumped out at me: [Gallup Polling] also indicates that from 1939 to 2005, 37 to 49 percent of those surveyed reported that they attended church or synagogue in the week before they were surveyed. From the period to 1992 to 2005, those…

In their endless quest to evangelize the world, Christian apologists like this one are prone to making grandiose claims about the supposed perfect accuracy of biblical prophecy: Unique among all books ever written, the Bible accurately foretells specific events – in detail – many years, sometimes centuries, before they occur. Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in…

I’ve posted a new essay on Dangerous Intersection, “The Supreme Court restores habeas corpus“. This is a followup to my post from October 2006, “This Is Not America“. This is an open thread.

Inspired by an analogy invented by Daniel Dennett, I have some thoughts for the benefit of those who believe that an atheist’s life must necessarily be meaningless and nihilistic. Imagine that there’s a society which, instead of God, believes in Cupid. This is the Cupid of Greek mythology, as co-opted by greeting card companies: the…

Among Christian groups who hold to belief in a literal apocalypse, the most common view today is “pretribulationist” – the belief that God will remove his faithful from the world in the Rapture, following which there will be seven years of suffering and bloodshed as unsaved humanity is tortured by God and ruled by the…

It’s been a long time in the making, but I’ve finished the tenth and final chapter of my book. Its title is “Into the Clear Air”, and it discusses the process of becoming an atheist, on an individual level, and the effort to organize atheists on a political level. As before, I’m open to editorial…

The Volokh Conspiracy has a fascinating excerpt from the writings of Anthony Comstock (HT, Dispatches from the Culture Wars): The respectable infidel is not even referred to, but simply those who stand in the forefront, zealous to be known as opposed to God and religion, and who by their blasphemous speeches and publications are putting…