Author: Adam Lee

This is an open thread to address the comment below left by a Christian visitor. Replies are welcome; as always, let’s have a civil discussion.

Dear Mr. Chick, You probably don’t know me, but I’m writing to send you my thanks. I used to be a hardcore, evil, godless atheist, but after reading some of your wonderful Christian fundamentalist cartoon tracts, I’ve realized just how wrong I’ve been. Now I know that there is a God who loves me and…

Inspired by a recent post on Philosophy, et cetera, I want to talk a little about zombies and what they imply for a materialist theory of the mind. When I say “zombie,” I don’t mean the shambling, flesh-eating undead of horror films. This thought experiment is about philosophical zombies, which are a different beast altogether.…

Last year, around the time I inaugurated my Poetry Sunday series, I contacted Prof. Philip Appleman to ask for permission to reprint some of his work which I’d seen in Freethought Today. He graciously assented to my request, and even said a few kind words about “The Gods“, my own brief foray into free verse,…

Although abortion is stereotyped as the most controversial and divisive social issue there is, I think the moral issues at stake are actually fairly unambiguous. This installment of “On the Morality Of” will explain why. Pared down to its essence, the moral question posed by abortion is a simple one: is an unborn fetus a…

Today’s Poetry Sunday features a few selections from the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Wilcox was born in 1850 in Wisconsin and soon acquired renown as a poet, becoming well-known for her writing by the time she graduated high school. Her poems were resolutely plain and optimistic, and though her simple, sometimes singsong verse was…

Over the past two months, I’ve written about the differing epistemologies of religion – where the individual’s personal conviction is taken as a reliable guide to truth (“The Aura of Infallibility“) – and science – where the assumption is that individuals are fallible and should work as a group to correct each other in a…

In “Unmoved Mover“, I wrote about the presuppositional argument used by some modern Christian apologists. In this post, I want to say some more about presuppositionalism. The presuppositionalists have a point in this sense and in this sense only: a worldview is worth being held only if it is possible to reason consistently from that…

Via Reuters, a story out of the U.K. that made me very happy indeed: British “psychics” are protesting a new consumer-protection law which they fear will require them to offer actual proof of their alleged powers. The law currently in force in this area is the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951, which does in fact…

This past Tuesday, a DC-9 jetliner crashed on takeoff in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After failing to lift off, the plane crashed and burst into flame on the ground. Among the passengers were the Mosiers, a family of Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries. With the help of other passengers, they forced open a…