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.
The biggest asset for the Sunday Assembly is also its biggest downfall: It resembles a church in many ways. The organizers want all the benefits of worship — songs, sermons, community, ritual — without any of the religious nonsense. As I’ve said many times before, it makes for a wonderful stepping stone for people who no longer believe in God but don’t want to ditch everything they love about church. For atheists who didn’t like church to begin with, though, it’s a hard sell. There’s very little overlap, I suspect, between the crowd you’d find at some random atheist convention and the people you’d meet at a local Sunday Assembly gathering. That’s not a bad thing in any way — just an observation. John Rael recently attended a Sunday Assembly meeting in his area, and he really enjoyed the lectures and music… but he has no plans to go back. He explains why in this video: Read more
A month ago, when the brouhaha at Wheaton College (in which a professor got in trouble for saying Muslims and Christians worshipped the same God) was just developing, Religion News Service reporter Jonathan Merritt described the school this way in an attempt to show it was relatively liberal when compared to other Christian colleges: Founded in 1860, Wheaton has long been considered a fairly open-minded institution within evangelicalism. Science professors can teach evolution, government professors need not support conservative political theories, and students don’t have to worry about strict dress codes or stringent curfews like students at more fundamentalist colleges. In 2003, it eased bans on alcohol consumption and dancing. Fred Clark, a Christian blogger here at Patheos, zooms in on that phrase — “Science professors can teach evolution” — because, he says, it’s indicative of a much larger problem at the school: Read more
If you visited Hallandale Beach, Florida over the holidays, you would have found a Nativity scene, Christmas tree, and menorah up by City Hall. They obviously have an open forum for these kinds of things. It prompted Chaz Stevens, the activist best known for putting up Festivus Poles on government property, to take his trolling to new heights. He asked for and received permission to place outside City Hall this upside-down cross that reads “In Chaz We Trust. All others pay cash.” Read more
