Author: Adam Lee

The Zombie Saints According to all three of the New Testament’s Synoptic gospels, miracles attended Jesus’ death: a mysterious midday darkness over all the land and the veil of the Jewish temple torn in half. (The Gospel of John omits these miracles, differing with the Synoptics in this point as in others.) However, there’s one…

Lately, there have been some encouraging signs that believers of conscience are more willing to stand up to the religious right than they once were. But this effort, though well-intentioned, is not the right way to do it. It’s time for a ceasefire in the Christmas culture wars. …We invite Messrs. O’Reilly, Gibson and Donohue…

Today is – at least to my northern hemisphere readers – the winter solstice, shortest day of the year. For three months now, we’ve seen the sun set and the night fall progressively earlier each day. But this date marks the terminus of that trend, and though the heart of winter still lies ahead, from…

Back in March, I commented on a Beliefnet debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. In part 4 of that debate, Andrew Sullivan made what I thought was an astonishing concession: But I can say that [this experience] represented for me a revelation of God’s love and forgiveness, the improbable notion that the force behind…

As the holiday season approaches, the partisans of the religious right are ramping up their annual “war on Christmas” rhetoric, which seems to grow more disproportionate with every passing year. The latest example is this absurdly ignorant column, whose author apparently has never heard of separation of church and state (she wonders if the reason…

I’ve written on several past occasions about how belief in malignant supernatural forces causes real harm to real people. There are examples of this from every region of the world, but some of the most wrenching are from Africa, where Biblical beliefs about demons and evil spirits still run rampant. In January, I wrote about…

Compliments of the season, today’s Poetry Sunday brings you “The Snowstorm” by the famous American transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston, son of a Unitarian minister, and at first looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps. But before he was 30, he walked away from even that liberal…

Last night I saw The Golden Compass, the movie adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman’s acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. The movie, like the book, is set in a fantastic and richly imagined parallel universe, similar to our own world but different in many important ways. In Pullman’s steampunk world, human beings’…

Inspired by an interview on a recent episode of Freethought Radio, I want to talk about a term that greatly annoys me: “values voters“. This term is used by American religious conservatives to describe themselves, and all too often, we see the media playing along and using it to describe this voting bloc as well.…

There’s at least one Christian denomination that won’t be singing “peace on earth” this holiday season. A diocese of the Episcopal Church has seceded and plans to align with a South American branch of the Anglican Church, the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. (For readers unfamiliar with the tedious details of church hierarchy, the…