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.
Doreen Pawelk was a member of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in New Germany, Minnesota for more than 50 years, but the 84-year-old had more recently parted ways with their theology and stopped attending services. Still, after her church-going husband died last year, she assumed that she could at least be buried next to him when her time came. But then she received this letter from the church telling her that, because she no longer attended services regularly, she’d have to find a new burial plot, too: Read more
It was more than a year ago that Pastor Mark Driscoll resigned from Mars Hill Church in Seattle. It was a long time coming, given that he had trolled his own church website’s forums, used church funds to game the system and turn his book about marriage into a bestseller, was caught plagiarizing, and was just an all-around sexist and asshole. Looks like his self-imposed exile is over. Yesterday he announced the formation of a brand new church in Phoenix, Arizona: Read more
We’re still waiting to find out if the Phoenix City Council in Arizona will allow members of The Satanic Temple to deliver an invocation prayer at a meeting on February 17. I posted the other day about how State Rep. Kelly Townsend doesn’t want to wait for the answer. She already announced a prayer rally to counteract whatever damage the Satanists may cause. It’s in part because of stunts like this that Townsend is being challenged in her upcoming re-election bid for Arizona State Representative. And that challenger, Democrat Cara Prior, is openly atheist (and a courteous one at that). Read more
One of the most quoted lines in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is the passage that opens up Chapter 2: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Dawkins point was that, despite all those qualities, a lot of people had become immune to God’s awfulness, preferring to worship a loving, caring deity instead. But critics were no doubt furious that he had blasphemed God in such a way. Who knew that Dawkins was being too kind in his assessment? Dan Barker, the co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and a former Christian preacher himself, says that the God of the Bible is much, much worse than Dawkins gave Him credit for. And in his new book, Barker explains why that is. It’s called, appropriately, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction (Sterling, 2016): The book goes into detail for each quality Dawkins listed, quoting chapter and verse from the Bible to justify the description. And then it continues, rattling off even more unpleasant traits for God that Dawkins left out. In the excerpt below, Barker explains why God is indeed “jealous and proud of it”: Read more
