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.
5th grader Zachary Golob-Drake was supposed to deliver a speech to his fellow 4th and 5th grade classmates yesterday morning. It wasn’t just any speech. It was a speech that was chosen to be the best in his class and Thursday morning was his chance to win a spot as one of the representatives to the regional 4-H Tropicana Public Speech contest. That glory came to a sudden halt on Wednesday when the assistant principal at USF/Patel Partnership Elementary School in Tampa, Florida pulled Zachary aside to tell him he would have to rewrite his speech or drop out of the contest. Why? Because Zachary’s speech was all about how religious extremism has hurt humanity and how we’d all be better off following the Golden Rule (like Jesus and Muhammad wanted, he added): Read more
I almost feel bad for Creationists. They try so hard to be credible but their explanations too often hit a wall of reality and they’re forced to find a way around it without sounding like crazy people. It never works, of course. Just take a look at this new “research” paper put out by Nathaniel T. Jeanson of the Institute for Creation Research. Jeanson is a Harvard Medical School graduate who seems to knows how evolution works… but actively denies its truth. What’s shocking is that he acknowledges the strength of evolution (with references to published scientific papers)… and then tosses in references to the Bible to make his paper worthless. The evolutionary model is so robust that it leads to predictions of molecular function. Under the assumptions of this model, species will grow more and more distant molecularly over time, unless some natural force constrains random variation. For proteins that have evolved differences rapidly, evolutionists predict that these proteins have fewer functional constraints than proteins which have evolved differences slowly (Futuyma 2009). … This conundrum intensifies when considering hierarchical sequence patterns. For example, different species of Drosophila are more genetically distant from one another (Drosophila 12 Genomes Consortium 2007) than humans and chimpanzees are from one another (again, debates over the precise sequence identity notwithstanding [Bergman and Tomkins 2012; The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium 2005; Tomkins 2011; Tomkins 2013; Tomkins and Bergman 2012; Wood 2006a]). Yet, the Drosophila species likely share a common ancestor since they belong to the same biological family (Wood 2006a), whereas humans and chimpanzees clearly have separate ancestries (Genesis 1:26–28). Why would differences between the related species exceed differences between unrelated ones? Ah, yes. Genesis. That peer-reviewed publication cited by real scientists everywhere. Read more
In 2001, journalist Larry Getlen sat down with comedian extraordinaire George Carlin for the interviews that lasted a total of five hours. It culminated, at the time, into a one-page collection of quotations for Esquire magazine. Now, more than five years after Carlin’s death, Getlen has released an edited book of their full conversation, one that will make you want to revisit his classic bits all over again. The book is called Conversations with Carlin: An In-Depth Discussion with George Carlin about Life, Sex, Death, Drugs, Comedy, Words, and so much more: In the excerpt below, the two discuss Carlin’s early experiences with religion: Read more
