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.
Greg Gianforte, the wealthy Christian whose family foundation has donated a lot of money to Christian causes including the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum (a Creation museum), is considering running against Montana Gov. Steve Bullock in 2016. But Daniel Zolnikov (below), a Republican State Representative who supports Gianforte, says he doesn’t want to see the candidate campaign on his faith. The reason? Zolnikov is not religious and he doesn’t think faith is a good reason to vote someone into office. I repeat: A non-religious Republican politician is calling for a fellow Republican to tamper down his faith rhetoric. There’s a sentence I never thought I would type… Read more
Our latest podcast guest is Cristin Padgett, a Democrat hoping to win a seat in the Texas State House. She’s doing that in a heavily gerrymandered district in a very red part of the state. What makes her candidacy so unique, though, is that she has made public the fact that she’s an atheist, making her one of the only openly non-theistic candidates this election cycle in any part of the country. Not exactly part of anyone’s playbook in Texas politics. We spoke with Padgett about how she can convince Texans in her district to support her, what she could accomplish with a Republican majority in the House, and what she learned from the failed gubernatorial campaign of Wendy Davis. Read more
The view that the Bible is the perfect word of God is one that’s commonly held by Christians… but demonstrably false. I have such great interest in the Bible that I have devoted much of my life to studying it. But revealing it as the imperfect text it is has become especially important because of the many efforts to use the idea of biblical inerrancy to manipulate others in ways that are often against their best interests. Read more
