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.
Over the past couple of years, what began as a personal blog has turned into a hub with several contributors and multiple posts per day. As always, I’d like to continue expanding the reach of this site. That entails bringing on additional contributors with different voices, including more guest posts from people who can offer interesting and different perspectives, creating more YouTube videos, and making the podcasts sound more professional. In order to facilitate all of this, I’ve created a page at Patreon. (You can now see on that page a list of things I’ve been able to do thanks to your contributions.) Read more
Back in February, I posted an important update on what’s happening with the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education (in California). This is the district in which board meetings are indistinguishable from a church service, with members frequently leading explicitly Christian prayers and reading Bible verses. Judge Jesus G. Bernal had finally ruled that these prayers were unconstitutional and ordered the School Board to put an immediate stop to them. What we didn’t know then was how much this would cost the District. Now we have an answer to that question: Read more
When God’s Not Dead came out two years ago, it really was a phenomenon. That’s not to say the movie was any good, but it certainly found an audience that wanted to see it and talk about it, even if that meant trashing it. Call it the evangelical version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Here’s the most important data: With a budget of $2 million, God’s Not Dead went on to make more than $60 million by the end of its run. No wonder the filmmakers wanted to make a sequel. So how did God’s Not Dead 2 do, compared to its predecessor? The movie earned $8.1 million in its opening weekend… which may sound impressive until you realize all the caveats. Read more
Erica Flores Dunahoo, her husband, and their two children were hoping to find cheap rent in the RV park owned by Gene Baker. He welcomed Erica with open arms at the end of February, but that changed the next day when he learned that Stanley Hoskins, her husband and a sergeant in the National Guard, was black: Read more