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 City Commission in Casselberry, Florida has no idea what to do with prayer at meetings. For a while now, they’ve been giving the prayers — which is clearly illegal — and they have to come up with an alternative. The right answer is: Don’t have them at all and get to work. But that’s not what they want and a discussion about what to do took up quite a bit of their meeting on November 9. Atheist Joseph Richardson, who recently delivered a non-religious invocation in the city of Apopka, is paying attention to the issue and he told me the Central Florida Freethought Community already sent the commission a warning letter. (Maybe that’s what prompted this discussion in the first place.) And if you listen to their meeting, which Richardson just put online, you realize at least one of the commissioners has no idea what she’s doing. Richardson was kind enough to timestamp/summarize the relevant parts of the meeting: Read more
A week before Veteran’s Day, the Mayor of Kissimmee, Florida had every intention of saying the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the City Commission meeting. But just to make things interesting, he decided to play a video of entertainer Red Skelton’s famous bit defining every word in the Pledge. The story, as Skelton tells it, is that when he was younger, his school’s principal felt the students were just reciting the Pledge without really understanding it, so he explained to them its true meaning. Just one problem. Even though Skelton gave his speech in 1969, that story took place before 1954, when the words “Under God” were added. Which led to mass confusion when all the Commissioners began reciting the Pledge along with Skelton… Read more
