Author: Adam Lee

I’m not normally one to indulge in schadenfreude, but here’s a piece of news I cannot restrain my glee over hearing: Kent Hovind and his wife have been convicted of tax fraud – and it couldn’t have happened to two nicer people. The Hovinds were charged in July with twelve counts of willful failure to…

“This persistence is what any scientific attack on religion must explain — and this one doesn’t. Dawkins mentions lots of modern atheist scientists who have tried to explain the puzzle: Robert Hinde, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, DS Wilson, Daniel Dennett, all of them worth reading. But he cannot accept the obvious conclusion to draw from…

John Knott, the owner of Quadrille, a fabric and wall coverings company based in Manhattan, expected surprises when he bought a weekend home in the country, an 1839 Greek Revival house in Kinderhook in Columbia County, N.Y. Inconveniences were bound to crop up — a leaky roof, problematic plumbing, boiler issues. But he was not…

It was on a wintry night last year, a night not unlike this one, that I met the Tempter for the first time. It happened during that season when the mood of the world begins to turn, when summer is a distant memory and the rustling sheaves of autumn are starting to give way to…

I’m sorry to report the death of Philip Paulson. Paulson was an outspoken atheist and humanist and a Vietnam veteran, author of the essay “I Was an Atheist in a Foxhole“, which I have long linked to from Ebon Musings. He was also the chief litigant in a multi-year and still ongoing legal fight to…

To my readers, A remarkable thing has happened recently. In the past few weeks, I’ve received, by my count, no fewer than four independent (as far as I know) e-mails asking me if I intend to seek publication of my writings in a format beyond this website. I have responded to these inquiries individually, but…

The End of Faith Summary: An incendiary polemic against unjustified belief. Many strong points, strongly made – but what on earth is that endorsement of psychic powers doing in there? With the 2004 publication of his book The End of Faith, Sam Harris has probably become one of the best-known and most influential atheists in…

Wired has recently published a long article, titled Battle of the New Atheism, about the inroads made by prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and the attacks they have launched against faith. The article does not treat their views inaccurately or with malice, but nevertheless the author, Gary Wolf, seems…

“The book (The End of Faith) has spent nearly 20 weeks on bestseller lists… Presale orders of ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ earned the book a spot among Amazon.com’s top 10 a month before its Sept. 19 publication. It debuted at No. 7 on the bestsellers’ list and is now in its sixth printing with…

In the United States of America today, churches and religious groups are treated with enormous sensitivity and deference by politicians and the media, a deference they have not earned. Far too often, the government and society in general bends over backwards to accommodate and encourage religious beliefs even when there is no rational reason why…