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.
Maryam Namazie, an atheist and outspoken critic of extremist Islam, was scheduled to speak at the end of October at Warwick University (England) on behalf of the Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists’ Society. She was going to talk about “apostasy, blasphemy and nudity in the age of ISIS.” But the school’s students’ union declined the request (essentially denying the atheist group the resources it needed to bring Namazie there) because: … after researching both her and her organisation, a number of flags have been raised. We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus. There a number of articles written both by the speaker and by others about the speaker that indicate that she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on campus. Read more
As Tracey posted earlier this week, the CBS show The Doctors was going to have a showdown between Joshua Feuerstein (the red baseball cap-wearing Christian evangelist) and Mikki Willis (the dad who let his son pick out a Little Mermaid doll for his birthday). So how did that go? It turns out when Feuerstein isn’t filmed in vertical video, he loses all of his powers! All four panelists in addition to Willis took turns denouncing the bigot until, eventually, the audience just booed his comments. It was beautiful. And only partly because Feuerstein wasn’t yelling at the screen. Read more
J. D. Brucker has written books about why Christian beliefs fail and why religion itself is a problem. His latest book, though, is far more introspective. It’s called Facing Oblivion: Essays on Life, Death and Grieving from a Nonbeliever (Atheist Republic, 2015): In the excerpt below, Brucker explains why the absence of an afterlife doesn’t damper his spirit: Read more
