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
While the focus of the film Spotlight was on the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in Boston, it’s easy to forget that the actual team of reporters wrote about much more than the story that’s the basis of the film. One of the pieces they worked on was about Rev. James Talbot, a priest (and teacher and soccer coach) who taught at Boston College High School. Read more
Phil Zuckerman, professor of secular studies at Pitzer College, has just released a new book analyzing the research that has been done on the growing numbers of atheists, Agnostics, and others who don’t belong to any organized religion. It’s called The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies (Oxford University Press, 2016). In the excerpt below, Zuckerman and co-authors Luke W. Galen and Frank L. Pasquale discuss the topic of death and suicide: Read more
Credit where it’s due: Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, is openly criticizing evangelical Christians who are jumping on the Donald Trump bandwagon, despite the candidate’s obvious disdain for evangelical values and actions. Moore at least sees through the façade. Now, in a piece for the Washington Post, he explains why he’s not calling himself an “evangelical” (at least until the election is over) and how secular critics were right in our criticism of the Religious Right: Read more
