Author: Adam Lee

Last month, in “The Aura of Infallibility“, I talked about how some religious believers declare themselves and their beliefs to be infallible in order to ward off the frightening possibility of having to decide what is true. This is, obviously, a futile tactic. We can proclaim ourselves to be immune to error as often as…

“The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! Good were it for that man if he had never been born.” —Mark 14:21 C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of letters, exchanged between…

This is an open thread to hold the discussion split off from the “On Amateur Atheism” thread. Comments and replies welcome.

In a world of hostile religious believers, a lone atheist is a target. Vjack of the always superb Atheist Revolution provides a chilling example, an atheist family in rural Pennsylvania who incurred severe harassment and reprisal from their believing neighbors after they complained about blatant religious indoctrination in the local public school, culminating with them…

This is an image of the Muslim prophet Mohammed: Via AINA; first published by Jyllands-Posten September 2005 So’s this: Via AINA; first published by Jyllands-Posten September 2005 And also this: Via Wikimedia Commons I bring this up because, as you might have guessed, free speech and Islam are again in the news. Last month, over…

Since the comment thread for my post “On Amateur Atheism” has sparked a lively debate, I looked around on the internet earlier today for some further explanation of John Haught’s views. I found them in this Salon interview, and I’d like to offer some further comments on the theology outlined therein. One of Haught’s major…

This week, the Christian Century published an article by the Catholic theologian John Haught, titled “Amateur atheists: Why the new atheism isn’t serious“. Before I say anything more, I want to acknowledge that John Haught is not the real enemy. He testified for the side of the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design…

Today’s post on atheist morality concerns the use of natural and artificial pharmaceuticals for pleasure. This practice may be nearly as old as humanity – three-thousand-year-old Andean mummies have been found to contain traces of coca, and the brewing of beer may date back to the Stone Age. Today, the legality of such substances varies…

(Author’s Note: The following review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site’s policy for such reviews.) Summary: A libertarian political tract disguised as a work of science. Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market concerns “evolutionary economics” – the way that evolutionary forces have shaped human instincts about trading, value and exchange,…

I’ve put up a new post on Dangerous Intersection, “Barack Obama gets it right“.