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.
American author and atheist activist Avijit Roy (below) was murdered this past February during a visit to Bangladesh. His wife, who was also attacked, escaped with her life. Since then, many other atheists (and those with connections to atheists) have died in the country at the hands of Muslim extremists. In the latest New Yorker, Samanth Subramanian looks at the details of Roy’s death, the 84-person hit list that included his name, and the government’s pathetic response to all of it: Read more
The parting of the Red Sea? The burning bush? Jesus walking on water? A lot of Christians say these miracles defy all rational explanation and help confirm their faith. Indeed, if those things really happened as the Bible says, atheists have their work cut out for them. But if you wanted to come up with scientific explanations for how those things could have happened, those miracles don’t seem nearly as magical: Read more
Our latest podcast guest is Michael De Dora, director of the Center for Inquiry’s Office of Public Policy and CFI’s representative to the United Nations. He’s currently the president of the UN’s NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief. I spoke with him about what we can do about the bloggers currently under attack in Bangladesh, whether our government is doing anything to protect atheists overseas, and what his conversations are like with the Saudi Arabian representatives at the United Nations. Read more
One of the reasons skeptics fight so hard to defend science education is because we recognize the value of understanding the basics of the subject. You don’t have to be an expert to realize the consequences of science illiteracy. When one of the GOP frontrunners is a brain surgeon who believes in Creationism, we have problems. That’s why it’s frustrating to hear that the Woodland Town Council in North Carolina rejected a solar panel farm in part because of how badly people in the community understood what that meant. Just listen to residents Bobby and Jane Mann: Read more
