Author: Adam Lee

Attention please: Due to a surge in traffic over the past few months, Ebon Musings is now bumping up against its monthly bandwidth transfer limits at its current host. I’m taking action to move it to a new host that can handle its growth. Therefore, if it should be down for a few days in…

Despite the advantages of universal utilitarianism, most people in the world today shun secular moral systems and rely on religious beliefs to provide them with the guidelines for morality. In fact, despite the countless evils it has spawned over the ages, many people believe that religion is the only way to obtain an ethical code,…

Although I have written previously of Daylight Atheism’s rapid growth (and let me add that the total hit count for August shattered the previous record from July), this weblog appears to be attracting attention in a way that I did not at all expect. Several days ago, I was contacted by Chris Mooney, author of…

In Part 2 of this series, we reached the conclusion that happiness is the ultimate value and we should strive to increase it. This result can be formalized into a secular ethical system I call universal utilitarianism, whose key tenet is as follows: Always minimize both actual and potential suffering; always maximize both actual and…

In the previous post in this series, I argued that moral relativism is a logically inconsistent position and must be discarded. The only remaining option is moral objectivism; that is, the position that some acts are objectively right and others are objectively wrong, and that this will be true regardless of any person or group’s…

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula draws my attention to a Newsweek article by Jerry Adler, “The New Naysayers“, about several prominent atheists and the impact they have had on American culture and society. In sum, I agree with Myers: this article was terrible. (Newsweek in general has a poor track record when it comes to atheism.)…

A few weeks ago, I read Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven, a chilling account of the persistence of fundamentalist Mormon sects in the Utah desert that still practice polygamy, often forcing girls as young as 12 or 13 to marry older men who already have dozens of wives. (As Krakauer documents, this…

Back in March of this year, soon after the founding of Daylight Atheism, I wrote a series of posts under the collected title “On Free Will“. In that series, I argued that appeals to the supernatural are neither necessary nor helpful in explaining the origins of human behavior, and that a rational, physical account of…

The recent violence in Lebanon, as well as the worsening sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, that have dominated the headlines in recent weeks remind us of the sheer unending vindictiveness of religious warfare. Indeed, of all the worst trouble spots in the world either currently or in recent memory – Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, India and Pakistan,…

I was in New York City the other week, near Penn Station, when I was accosted by a well-dressed man in a business suit attempting to hand out fliers to passers-by. I did not take one, but inside the train station, I noticed one cast aside and lying on the ground. Out of curiosity, this…