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 video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, reveals the five stories that I think will most affect atheists in 2014: We’d love to hear your thoughts on the project — more videos will be posted soon — and we’d also appreciate your suggestions as to which questions we ought to tackle next! Read more
For some reason, there’s a story making the rounds again about a pastor who tried to walk on water… and drowned: … An evangelist who tried replicating Jesus’ miracle of walking on water has reportedly drowned off the western coast of Africa. Pastor Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle, and he attempted it from a beach in Gabon’s capital of Libreville. ‘He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus,’ an eyewitness told the Glasgow Daily Record. ‘He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat. Let’s put on our Snopes hat for a bit… Read more
Karl Giberson (below) has a PhD in Physics from Rice University and once held the title of Vice-President of The BioLogos Foundation, a group that attempts to reconcile faith and science. That blemish aside, you can imagine the trouble he got in when he attempted to teach evolution at a Christian institution. Even though the science he taught was sound, the administration, along with parents and donors, wanted him to lie to the students and teach Creationism instead. He refused to do that and had to leave as a result. In an article for The Daily Beast, he says 2013 was a “terrible year for evolution”, but his story indicates that it was only terrible if you were a professor at a Christian school trying to convince a bunch of people living inside a bubble that they were misinterpreting the Bible at the expense of reality: Read more
I tried to read Sarah Palin’s new book Good Tidings and Great Joy. Really. I tried. Hell, her people even sent me an autographed copy of the book. (The inscription reads “God Bless You,” as if she needed one more way to stick it to atheists…) The whole book is a lesson in patience. You have to find a way to flip the pages without knocking out everyone around you since every chapter just makes you progressively angrier. Ever read a Creationist textbook that you know others read in complete earnest? This is just like that. It’s not that she holds different opinions from me; I deal with that all the time and it’s never a problem. At first, I thought what upset me the most was just how uninformed she was. She spent chapters writing about atheists and clearly didn’t even bother to talk to any to make sure she was on the right track. But then I realized I had it completely flipped. It wasn’t that she was willfully ignorant. It’s that she knew damn well what we’re all about and she was deliberately misrepresenting us just to rile her base. Once that hit me, I saw the book in a completely different way. Here: Just look at some of the things she said (by way of a ghostwriter, of course): Read more
Last week, American Atheists launched a billboard in Salt Lake City, Utah to promote their upcoming convention. It featured West and Lennie Monnett along with their two sons and niece (of whom they’re guardians). The sign pointed out that they were not Mormons and not just “ex-Mormons” — they were atheists: At the time, I wrote about the one concern I had with the sign: The billboard could use a little more clarity since it’s unclear whether just the parents are Mormons-turned-atheists or if the kids, too, left the faith at some point as well. But, you know, it’s a road sign. Not a lot of room for nuance. The Salt Lake Tribune thankfully settles that matter: Read more
