Author: Adam Lee

If you’re not familiar with the HubbleSite, you should be. The official website of the Hubble Space Telescope is rich with scientific background, news releases and announcements of new discoveries, and of course, jaw-dropping imagery of the cosmos, taken by one of humanity’s most justifiably famous scientific instruments. One of Hubble’s newest images has left…

I’m creating a thread to address this comment by Mollie: I’ve only been familiar with your site for a few days, so I’m not sure if this is the right place to discuss what I’m about to say. If not, please direct me to a more appropriate place. My husband thinks it’s a bad idea…

As atheists continue to make inroads into the media and our message becomes more widely noticed, we are attracting attention from all quarters. Some of the responses consist of delighted praise and relief that rationalists and freethinkers are finally making our voices heard. Some responses consist of the furious but ineffectual sputterings of religious fundamentalists.…

I’ve finished the third chapter of my book, which deals with the argument from evil and draws on my Ebon Musings essay “All Possible Worlds“. As before, any regular commenter who’s interested in reading the chapter and offering feedback is welcome to do so. E-mail me or leave a comment if interested. I’d like to…

Last month, I wrote about slavery and the Bible’s embarrassing (though historically understandable, if we assume there was no divine revelation behind it) endorsement of that vile practice. Today, slavery is widely recognized as the evil it is, and though it still exists in some forms, it lingers only in the shadows, not in the…

For Daylight Atheism’s second installment of Poetry Sunday, I’d like to reprint a beautiful composition by the distinguished Philip Appleman, who’s written a rich vein of atheist and freethought poetry in his career. Many religious traditions imagine that when we die, our souls stand before a river that is the gateway to the next life.…

“Now the names of the twelve apostles are these; The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip, and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the publican; James the son of Alphaeus, and Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus; Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who…

Last December, I wrote about a controversy in Albemarle County, Virginia, where right-wing Christians who sued for and won the right to distribute literature through the public schools’ “backpack mail” program were shocked – shocked! – to find out that there were other religions which then wanted to use that program for the same thing.…

When the history of our era is written, there is much that will be said about the failures of traditional, mainstream media organizations. One of the most disappointing is the media’s ritualized exaltation of “balance”, which in practice means giving equal time and attention to both sides of a debate regardless of whether one side’s…

As the so-called “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens attract increasing media attention, they’ve come under fire for supposedly being too sweeping in their denunciations of religion, too “extreme” in their criticism. Defenders of the established order, many of whom are religious liberals, pour scorn on these outspoken nonbelievers for daring…