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.
Ryan Bell, the former pastor who has since become an atheist, was recently invited to deliver a lecture to students in Pacific Union College’s Psychology and Social Work department. If you’re not familiar with the school, it’s a private Seventh-day Adventist Church-affiliated college… and it also happens to be Bell’s alma mater. So it definitely would’ve made for an interesting homecoming. Unfortunately, the lecture was canceled. The school’s President, Dr. Heather Knight, pulled the plug, it seems, because she was afraid Bell might plant seeds of doubt into the students’ minds. Bell wasn’t going to do that. His lecture wasn’t about why they should become atheists. But what exactly would have been the problem with challenging students on their core beliefs? That’s what Bell would like to know, and he wrote an open letter to Knight with that thought in mind: Read more
Five-year-old Julianna Snow is suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, “a hereditary disease where neurons in the brain and spinal cord are progressively destroyed.” It’s an incurable disease and catching a cold virus could be enough to kill her. But Julianna says that she doesn’t want to go back to the hospital if she gets sick again. She’d rather stay at home, die, and go to heaven. Read more
Last week, at East Syracuse Minoa Central High School in New York, a student remained seated during the Pledge of Allegiance, only to have her teacher flip out as if she did something wrong. The American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center explained the situation in a letter to the District: Read more
It’s nothing new for Creationist Ken Ham to appear on Christian radio and proclaim that a literal interpretation of the Bible is the way to go. If Christians don’t take Genesis as fact, the rest of the Bible may as well go down with the ship. It’s also not new for a Creationist to say gay marriage is an abomination because God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, and if you don’t believe Adam and Eve existed, how can you get away defending marriage as between one man and one woman? But I’ve never heard the argument Ham made recently, which is that if you don’t take Genesis literally, then we might as well all be naked. Read more
