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.
Fernando Alcántar grew up as a poor Catholic boy in Mexico and soon became a rising star in the Christian world… that is, until he came out as a gay atheist. That didn’t go over so well. His new memoir, with a foreword by Dan Barker, is called To the Cross and Back: An Immigrant’s Journey from Faith to Reason (Pitchstone Publishing, 2015): In the excerpt below, Alcántar details all the difficult “divorces” he’s gone through, but says he’s not angry about it: Read more
For the past several years, we’ve seen a large number of atheism-related books hit the market. Unlike the books written by the “New Atheists,” however, the more recent releases aren’t just about why you should stop believing in God or how religion is bad. They cover different aspects of atheism and cater to a variety of audiences. I compiled a list of my favorites in 2013 and 2014, and I’m excited to do it again now. These are the books I’ll be referencing for years to come and the ones I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to explore faith with a critical eye. I should mention this right now: I’ve covered many of these books on the site, I’ve been asked to write back-cover blurbs for some of them, my name appears in a few of the pages, and I know some of the authors personally. That’s inevitable when you do the sort of work I do. None of that, however, has any bearing on this list. I picked these books because I found them both fascinating and useful. You don’t have to believe me, but I just wanted to put that disclaimer right up front. So there you go. Read more
Jeff Sparrow has one of those holier-than-thou articles in The Guardian in which he goes after Richard Dawkins for his comments about Ahmed Mohamed (the kid whose clock was mistaken from a bomb), Sam Harris for saying that Ben Carson understands the threat from Muslim extremists better than Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Hitchens for supporting war in the Middle East a decade ago. You’d think he’s writing for Salon the way he throws everything about atheism under the bus because he finds reason to critique its most popular cheerleaders. Read more
