Author: Adam Lee

Despite the serious-sounding title, I’m laughing as I write this post. Yes, Americans United for Separation of Church and State is under attack. Yes, the perpetrators are a group of radical Christian dominionists who want to turn this country into their own vision of theocracy. Yes, their aim is to cause great harm and possibly…

A shocking story has recently come out of Texas. It seems that High Point, an Arlington megachurch, abruptly canceled a planned funeral after finding out the deceased was gay, and that his family planned to mention that fact: The pastor said that he could imagine a similar situation involving a different sin. Perhaps a mother…

The Roman Catholic church is the oldest, largest, and very likely the richest denomination of any organized religion on the planet Earth. It has over 1 billion believers worldwide; controls its own sovereign country ruled by the Pope; is the only religious denomination with permanent observer status at the United Nations; has its own radio…

Earlier this year, I wrote a post series titled “The Virtues“, which proposed a secular reinvention of the seven cardinal virtues of theology. But I now realize that with this series, I was making an additional, implicit point: that it is possible for human beings to be consistently virtuous. This was made clear to me…

Any informed observer of religious folly knows that setting dates for the apocalypse ranks among the major pastimes of fundamentalists and fanatics the world over. (The next most-popular pastime is explaining why those dates failed to pan out.) In fact, throughout human history, the years in which the end of the world has not been…

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” —1 Peter 5:8 “Only-begotten Son, seest thou what rage Transports our Adversary? whom no bounds Prescribed, no bars of Hell, nor all the chains Heaped on him there, nor yet the main Abyss Wide interrupt,…

Last month, the Los Angeles Times published a story titled “Religion beat became a test of faith“. The author, William Lobdell, described himself as a “serious Christian” – raised Episcopal, later a born-again evangelical, still later a convert to Roman Catholicism at his wife’s urging – who believed it was God’s plan to use him…

“Most well-meaning creationists would agree in principle that things that are not carefully documented and researched should not be used. But in practice, many of them are very quick to accept the sorts of evidences mentioned here, without asking too many questions. Why this seeming urge to find a startling, exciting ‘magic bullet’?” —Ken Ham…

The Drake equation, developed in the 1960s by the astronomer Frank Drake, laid the foundation for the scientific search for extraterrestrial life. This equation provides a way to estimate the number of intelligent, communicating civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy by combining all the prerequisites for the existence of such civilizations. The remarkable thing about…

The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design creationism, is infamous for its authorship of a secret document called the “Wedge Strategy“, which lays out their plan to overthrow the theory of evolution and “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God”. The leak…