Hemant Mehta is the founder and editor of FriendlyAtheist.com, a YouTube creator, and podcast co-host. He is a former National Board Certified math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He has appeared on CNN and FOX News and served on the board of directors for Foundation Beyond Belief and the Secular Student Alliance. He has written multiple books, including I Sold My Soul on eBay and The Young Atheist's Survival Guide. He also edited the book Queer Disbelief.
If you read Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, then you might remember that he created a computer program to simulate how evolution works. His “biomorphs” ultimately evolved in ways he couldn’t have anticipated — and that helped him explain the power of natural selection. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of that book’s publication, Penguin Books just reissued The Blind Watchmaker and they did something really incredible with the covers. They created their own version of Dawkins’ evolution program in order to create a unique biomorph for the cover of every single book. Read more
Rep. Randy Forbes, the Virginia Republican who founded the Congressional Prayer Caucus and frequently mixed church and state during his 15 years in Congress, lost his primary battle last week. (Boo hoo.) However, he’s not done tearing down the wall of separation yet. In an essay published in the Suffolk News-Herald, Forbes laments the idea that Christians can’t just push their religious views on other people even when they’re working for public schools and the government: Read more
Our latest podcast guest is Katherine Ozment, author of Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age. Ozment has worked for National Geographic and Boston magazine and been published in the New York Times. She lives in Chicago with her husband and three children. For years now, she’s been exploring how the ever-growing segment of non-religious parents raise their children. They’re not all atheists, but they have to grapple with the Big Questions about life and death and belonging, all without supernatural faith. She wrote a magazine article about it a few years ago, and she has now written a full-length examination into the topic. I spoke with her about what secular “grace” looks like, why atheists may want rituals traditionally reserved for the religious, and how the landscape for atheist parents is rapidly changing. Read more
Last week, Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California made news after saying in a sermon that he was sad that the Orlando nightclub shooter didn’t “finish the job,” that the real tragedy was that “more of them didn’t die,” and that the government should really be executing gay people via firing squad. Earlier today, hundreds of people stood outside his church to protest the hate. Here are glimpses of that protest: Read more