Author: Adam Lee

The doors of the Observatory are closed, and an eager crowd has gathered before them, milling about anxiously to await the unveiling of the newest Skeptics’ Circle. Your host, Ebonmuse, steps up to a podium beside the doors and addresses the crowd thusly: “Step right up, folks, to the Daylight Atheism Museum of Superstition and…

“Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes… After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called ‘The Cross…

In the first post of this series, I wrote about some of the diseases that afflict human beings from without. In this post, I will shift focus and discuss two articles about disorders that afflict us from within. The first, from March, is titled A Hunt for Genes That Betrayed a Desert People, about inherited…

For most of human history, the range of experience open to most people was narrow and limited. Untold millions of people lived and died never traveling more than a few miles from their birthplaces and never meeting more than a few hundred other individuals from their own communities, their horizon largely limited to the handful…

Offered for my readers’ amusement, I recently came across the following humbly named site: The True Bible Code. As with all devotees of the Bible code, this site works by randomly stringing together letters from randomly chosen chapters of the Bible until they manage to come up with one pattern that spells something and that…

A new essay, “Parting the Parthenon“, has been posted on Ebon Musings. The essay is a semi-serious look at the reasons to disbelieve in the Greek gods, written as a response to Christians who claim atheists focus exclusively on debunking Christianity. This is an open thread. Comments and feedback are welcome.

In the post Should Atheists Evangelize?, back in March, I argued for the conclusion that nonbelievers should, in fact, seek to spread the good news of atheism under certain circumstances. Since then, I have built on this foundation by proposing a plan for how best to achieve that. In previous posts of this series, I…

Earlier this month, I wrote a post titled “The Roar of Many Waters“, a frank recognition of the despair I sometimes feel in the face of an overwhelming tide of anti-rational and confrontational religion. But although I closed that post on a brighter note, I did not within it provide any concrete reasons for nonbelievers…

In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis puts a challenge to those who condemn the doctrine of Hell as immoral: “What are you asking God to do?” The apparent reasoning behind this question is that even those who think the idea of Hell is monstrous would be unable to come up with a…

The history of the human species is, as Carl Sagan put it, a series of great demotions. Prior to the scientific age, humanity believed that we were the crowning glory of creation, and that all the universe existed merely to pay tribute to us. But the advances in understanding brought about by the dawning of…