Author: Adam Lee

The second of the Virtues is compassion. The Latin roots of this word literally mean “suffering together”, but I think this captures at most one-half of what it means to be compassionate, and the less important half at that. While being compassionate does include perceiving others’ pain and distress and being motivated to relieve it,…

Were I inclined to believe in them, I would say that the New Testament gospels were a set of maddeningly strange and frustrating documents. Although they contain some beautiful ideas, they always stop just short of bringing them to their logical conclusions. They contain moving admonitions of universal love, but never go so far as…

The passage that today’s edition of “Little-Known Bible Verses” will examine is, if I say so myself, one of the most shocking in the entire Bible. In a book that contains talking snakes and donkeys, a man taking two of every living species to survive a flood in a wooden boat, and a god who…

After a nearly three-month wait, the wheels of our legal system have turned, and justice has been done at last: Kent Hovind, tax protestor and creationist con man extraordinaire, has been sentenced to ten years in federal prison for tax evasion. Hovind’s wife Jo, who was also convicted on the same slate of charges, will…

As regular readers of Daylight Atheism are likely aware, morality is a major concern of mine, both in how ethical behavior finds its foundation and in how those principles can be applied to issues of everyday life. Mainly this is because I genuinely am interested in determining what best constitutes the good life, although I…

I have written previously about many different religious beliefs that cause harm to human lives, but today I intend to target a new one. This is the belief that human beings have not come into existence as the result of natural processes – or at least, not solely as the result of natural processes –…

A Response to Ned Block’s “Blockhead” In a classic 1981 paper titled “Psychologism and Behaviourism“, the philosopher Ned Block proposed a thought experiment that has been dubbed “Blockhead” in his honor. Block’s experiment has to do with the Turing test, itself a classic proposal on how to test for the presence of intelligence in a…

In a previous post from Daylight Atheism titled “On Presuppositions” (all the way back in February 2006!), I wrote about how subconscious biases and prejudices, instilled in us by culture and surroundings, can exert a disturbingly measurable effect on our behavior. However, there is more to this story that deserves to be told. In the…

2006 has come and gone, and a new year is upon us. I don’t know about you, readers, but I feel a mood of unaccountable optimism. There seems to be a feeling of renewal in the air, one not solely accounted for by the unseasonably warm and pleasant weather in the northeastern United States, where…

Around the time of the elections last year, I read Crashing the Gate, a book by the creators of the popular liberal political blogs Daily Kos and MyDD. Among other things, this book put the blame for Democratic electoral losses in recent years at the feet of high-paid, ineffective consultants who encourage Democratic politicians to…