Daylight Atheism

In 2009, the Roman Catholic church convened an "apostolic visitation" - a sort of modern-day auto-da-fe - a rare step taken when the Vatican feels that a church-affiliated institution has gone seriously astray. The church officials in charge of the investigation conducted interviews at almost 400 ... Read More

This essay was previously published on AlterNet. Last November, I attended a debate in the NYU Intelligence Squared series on the topic, "Would the World Be Better Off Without Religion?" One of the audience questions concerned the enormous wealth hoarded by churches, which Christian apologist ... Read More

My latest article has been posted on AlterNet, Once Again, Believers Have it Wrong: Atheists Don't Just Want Sex, Drugs, and Lack of Morality. As you might have guessed, it's the culminating entry in my recent exchange with Peter Hitchens. In it, I discuss the absence of evidence for non-human ... Read More

Via Dangerous Intersection, I saw this TED lecture by Daniel Kahnemann, based on his book Thinking Fast and Slow, about the conflict between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self". His thesis is that we have countless moment-to-moment experiences, most of which quickly fade from memory ... Read More

I originally got this idea from Feministe, and I used to do it every couple of months on the old site. I think it's about time for another. This is an open thread for the purposes of self-promotion. If you maintain a blog or other site that you want to tell us about, now's the time! Feel free to ... Read More

This week, there's been a flurry of stories about Muslim groups trying to suppress criticism of Islam, both by law and by force. It's worth summarizing them briefly to show how these aren't isolated incidents, but parts of a larger and more disturbing trend. First up: I mentioned earlier the story ... Read More

The world is increasingly taking notice of the turmoil brewing in Israel, where a growing culture war between the rest of Israeli society and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, or "haredim", is becoming impossible to ignore. Simply stated, what the haredim want is gender apartheid: the forced ... Read More

Guest post by Samantha Eliza Benten The Law of Non-Contradiction, as stated by Aristotle: "One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time." Often, this is expressed in the formula: A ? ¬A, where "¬A" signifies "not A" or "not having quality A ... Read More

• Here's the top story for this week: After Jessica Ahlquist's court victory over illegal state-sponsored prayer in her high school, she's been receiving a torrent of vicious hate mail and threats of violence, presumably from good and pious Christians who support prayer. Here are some of the most ... Read More

Peter Hitchens has written two further comments on my previous post, in one of which he states that he'll be bowing out of the debate from this point on. So be it; there are, of course, many respects in which we disagree, but I appreciate the time and effort he's put into this conversation. That ... Read More

I've previously written about the case of Jessica Ahlquist, an incredibly brave young atheist from Rhode Island who's the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging an unconstitutional "School Prayer" banner in her high school's auditorium. Today, I'm happy to announce that the judge has ruled, and it ... Read More

One of my all-time most popular posts on Daylight Atheism, "The Scars of Evolution", lists some of the kludges, hacks and jury-rigs left behind in the human genome, the telltale signature of evolution. The vestigial structures and design compromises still found in human bodies are tangible evidence ... Read More

Last month, I was invited to Syracuse University by the local affiliate of the Secular Student Alliance, where I spoke on the topic of atheism and morality. I'm happy to announce that video of that talk is now available, in three parts, which I've embedded below. The talk is about 25 minutes long ... Read More

[Editor's Note: Please welcome Sarah Jane Braasch-Joy back to Daylight Atheism! Regular readers from before my move to Big Think will remember her as a dedicated defender of feminism and secularism and one of DA's most prolific guest authors. New readers can read my introduction of her here, or see ... Read More

This weekend, I was upstate in the Hudson Valley visiting my parents, and we went hiking along the ridge of Schunemunk Mountain. While we were walking, I spotted the rock depicted in the image accompanying this post, a reddish pebble about a thumb length in diameter and cemented into a loose boulder ... Read More