Author: Adam Lee

Since his spectacular public disgrace last year, the once-powerful evangelical preacher Ted Haggard has not returned to New Life Church, the Colorado megachurch he founded. However, a few days after confessing that the allegations laid against him were true, he arranged to have a letter read to his former congregation in which he admitted his…

Today I’m launching yet another new post series on Daylight Atheism, and yet another that I’ve had in mind since creating this weblog. I’ve often made it known that I get somewhat annoyed at religious apologists who claim that atheists have no morals (and what atheist wouldn’t?). Although I’ve sharply criticized people making this insulting…

“Let’s see, we have scores of Baptist Hospitals, Method[ist] Hospitals, Jewish Hospitals, Catholic Hospitals, etc., etc.. Each of these have ‘outreach’ programs both here and in the most dismal places on earth, staffed with dedicated medical doctors and nurses. Where oh where are the Atheist’s hospitals, or soup kitchens?” —quoted by Jonah Goldberg for National…

“Just another day in the city. A sidewalk grate, the kind that millions of feet trod upon every day, gives way, sending a woman tumbling into the hole and landing her in the hospital. Downtown, a 15-foot pipe falls off a 40-story skyscraper, crashing through a firehouse nearby, injuring two. In densely packed Manhattan, with…

A very entertaining story has come out of Hong Kong recently. After the Hong Kong goverment’s “Obscene Articles Tribunal” censored a Chinese student magazine as “indecent” for publishing a sex column asking if readers had ever fantasized about incest or bestiality, over 800 residents protested by calling on the government to classify the Bible as…

The human brain is a belief-forming machine. It is what defines us as a species: we guide our actions by creating mental models of the world and using those models to hypothesize about what will happen under a given set of circumstances. Our ability to create such models far surpasses that of any other species,…

An article in the New York Times this week, “Religious Groups Reap Federal Aid for Pet Projects“, gives some troubling details about the growing trend of religious groups seeking – and receiving – no-strings-attached federal grants disbursed by a direct act of Congress, usually called “earmarks”, to fund their pet projects. Sometimes these grants are…

Jerry Falwell, prominent Christian conservative and for many years the standard-bearer of America’s religious right, has died of an apparent heart attack. He was 73 years of age. Falwell was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1933, and graduated from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri in 1956. That same year, he was ordained and founded…

Normal people don’t start new religions. This seems like an obvious thing to say, but there’s an important point behind it. Most people, both in the present time and in past eras, are conformists who are far more likely to follow the trails paved by others than to blaze their own. Theists in general seem…

I’ve finished the second chapter of my book, which deals with the argument from scriptural atrocities and draws on my Ebon Musings essays “A Book of Blood” and “Infinite Punishment for Finite Sins“. As before, any regular commenter who’s interested in reading the chapter and offering feedback is welcome to do so. E-mail me or…