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.
It was a year ago today that New Zealander Philip Blackwood and his colleagues Tun Thurein and Htut Ko Ko Lwin were sentenced to jail in Myanmar because they posted on Facebook an image of Buddha wearing headphones in order to promote their new bar: Seriously. For that image, they’re still in jail. And performing manual labor as an added punishment. Read more
The good news is that Alabama’s science standards make clear that evolution is “substantiated with much direct and indirect evidence.” The bad news is that the state’s Board of Education decided this week to keep a disclaimer in all biology textbooks that suggests the theory is “controversial.” Read more
For years now, ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in New York have been receiving tens of millions of dollars in funding from the federal government as part of a program called E-rate, which The Jewish Week explained “subsidizes telecommunications services and infrastructure for schools and libraries.” There’s a story to be written about why private religious schools should be receiving taxpayer funding at all, but the bigger story right now is that ultra-Orthodox Jews essentially forbid their community from using the Internet. (After all, knowledge might pop their bubble.) Which means they’re getting a lot of money to increase their technological capabilities… even though the students aren’t allowed to use it. Yesterday, the FBI raided dozens of Jewish schools and local vendors in the city of Ramapo to investigate what appears to be widespread fraud: Read more
For the past year, whenever fire department officials and police chiefs have put “In God We Trust” decals on their vehicles, they’ve gone out of their way to explain how the message is totally not an endorsement of Christianity, adding that the stickers are privately funded, anyway. Now wait till you hear what’s going on in Tennessee. House Bill 2248, sponsored by Republican State Rep. Micah Van Huss, would strip $100,000 a year from the University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion — which is all the state funding they get. That’s bad enough. Van Huss, however, amended his own bill yesterday to make it even worse. Now he wants that money to be re-allocated in order to buy “In God We Trust” decals. Read more