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.
Two months ago, NFL star Arian Foster (a four-time Pro Bowler) told ESPN The Magazine’s Tim Keown that he didn’t believe in a Higher Power: It wasn’t a shock to those of us who, years ago, read about how he planned to teach his daughter about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and often tweeted things you wouldn’t expect from a religious individual. But he had never come right out as non-religious until that moment. He elaborated in a video filmed for the Openly Secular campaign: Read more
The Hillsborough Community College (Florida) Advisory Council did something sensible this week: The dropped the Pledge of Allegiance from their meetings. At first, they did it to save time, but news reports say there was also a heated discussion about the Pledge’s “appropriateness in an institution of higher learning which fosters academic freedom and structured dissent against authority.” (The group’s chair, Sunshine Gibbons, disputes that report, but doesn’t deny the Pledge is no longer a part of meetings.) Read more
Anytime you look at surveys about the religious beliefs of people in the U.S., people like me get lumped into this nebulous group known as the “Nones” (or the “Unaffiliated”). We’re the people who don’t belong to any organized religion. We’re atheists and Agnostics… and a whole bunch of people who believe in God but don’t like religious labels for whatever reason. While the Nones make up 22.8% of the country, the proportion of Nones who believe in a Higher Power is about 70%. In other words, most of the Nones actually believe in God and the supernatural and other forms of nonsense. That’s why it’s annoying to see confusing headlines like this one from LifeWay Research: “Nonreligious Americans See Evidence of Creator”: Read more
