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.
On Sunday night, just after Christians protested outside the inaugural meeting of the Greater Church of Lucifer, the building was vandalized by people who smashed in one of its windows. Unlike most acts of vandalism, though, this was was caught on camera. Sort of. While you can’t see the window being smashed, you can see the culprits outside the building around the 5:09 mark: Read more
You can’t put a price on how much damage the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals have done to the victims. But you sure as hell can count how much the Church has paid out as a result of those lawsuits. And that’s what Jack and Diane Ruhl of the National Catholic Reporter did. According to their research, since 1950, that amount comes out to $3,994,797,060.10. Nearly $4 billion. And that’s an underestimate since we still don’t know how much was spent for therapy for the victims, help for the offenders, and the creation of “safe environment” programs. Read more
Roland Bosee Jr. and Nino Esposito have been in a relationship since 1970. But in Pennsylvania, where they live, they were prohibited from having any sort of legal recognition of their union until last summer, when a judge legalized it in the state. They didn’t think that day would ever come. So a few years ago, they decided to take another route toward legal recognition of their union: Read more
I don’t know much about video games, but here’s what I can tell you about Undertale: It’s a role-playing game where you don’t even have to kill anyone if you don’t want to. And here’s a stylized version of one of the characters, Sans: Again, he’s just a harmless video game character. He’s also the subject of a question Pat Robertson decided to answer on The 700 Club yesterday. Viewer “Payton” said he saw the character on his daughter’s phone and wanted to know how to help his daughter “not be attracted to such demonic things.” Read more
