Author: Adam Lee

It’s been a while, but I haven’t forgotten. The fifth chapter of my book, which covers the argument from religious confusion and is based on the Ebon Musings essay “The Cosmic Shell Game”, is finally complete. I realize this chapter has taken a while – as for that, I can only plead work and other…

Earlier this month, the New York Times ran an article series about millionaires who don’t feel rich, mostly engineers and executives living in America’s Silicon Valley. Though most of the people profiled in the article have luxurious, paid-off homes, multiple cars and several million dollars already in the bank, they continue to work grueling, stressful…

Since this seems to be a week for tearing down Christian icons, I have another fall from grace to report: Bishop Thomas Weeks, founder of the international Christian ministry Global Destiny, was released on bond last week after turning himself in to face charges of brutally beating his estranged wife Juanita Bynum – herself a…

Time magazine this month has a rather amazing story about a decades-long crisis of faith in the life of Agnes Bojaxhiu, better known as Mother Teresa. A newly released biography, Come Be My Light, consists of numerous letters Teresa exchanged with her church superiors. These letters reveal that for the last fifty years of her…

Since the Enlightenment, fundamentalist religious leaders the world over have railed against the idea of free speech, for understandable reasons. By permitting other people to point out the fallacies in their arguments and dispute their claim to be the infallible voice of God, the right of free speech is the single most effective countermeasure to…

Solomon Asch. “Opinions and social pressure.” Scientific American, vol.193, no.5 (1955), p.31-35. Back in April, I wrote about the classic Milgram experiment and what it shows about how disturbingly willing people are to submit to authority, even in the presence of strong countervailing reasons. What about when the pressure to obey comes not from an…

Do you, readers, remember the golden age of American secularism, where freethinkers stood on every corner preaching that they believed one thing and Christians believed another, and that we should all ignore these differences and do our best to get along without attacking each other’s beliefs? I don’t either. But convicted Watergate felon and current…

I’ve said on previous occasions that Daylight Atheism is a weblog devoted to commentary and analysis, not breaking news. However, I’ve heard of a case sufficiently noteworthy that I think it merits an exception. Last month, the indomitable P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula posted a review of Stuart Pivar’s book Lifecode, which purports to explain the…

“I’ve written before about one variety of mirror-opposites of these illiteralist believers… those who I call ‘sectarian atheists.’ These are usually folks who start out like Marshall Hall, fully indoctrinated in the all-or-nothing illiteralism of American fundamentalism. They start out believing, like Hall, that the Earth must be fixed or else the Bible is false…

Recently, Greta Christina of Greta Christina’s Blog invited me to comment on a post of hers in which a theist mentioned my article “The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists“. This person claimed that the fulfillment of prophecies in the Bible should be sufficient reason for atheists to believe in Christianity. That comment can be viewed…