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.
Today’s edition of the New York Times features a wonderful profile of Dr. Eugenie Scott, the long-time executive director of the National Center for Science Education: Eugenie C. Scott’s journey to the front lines of the evolution wars began in 1974, when James Gavan, a physical anthropologist at the University of Missouri, accepted an invitation to debate Duane Gish, a biochemist and a leader in the creationist movement. At the time, Dr. Scott was a newly minted professor of physical anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Gavan had been her mentor at the University of Missouri, where she earned her doctorate, so she took a few of her students to Missouri to hear the debate. “We were greatly dismayed,” Dr. Scott recalled in an interview. “The scientist talked science, and the creationist connected to the audience and told good jokes and was really personable. And presented a lot of really bad science.” The most controversial passage in the piece has nothing to do with evolution, but with the age-old question of overlapping magisteria: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Back in June, Professor Linda Brunton of Columbia State Community College in Tennessee did something to upset some of the conservative Christian students in her psychology class: She made them think. Here’s how the Religious Right group how Alliance Defending Freedom explained the incident in a letter to the college president: [Click headline for more…] Read more
It’s good to be back 🙂 Huge thanks to Paul Fidalgo for taking care of this site so I could go off the grid for a few days. … Turns out there was news of a big wedding while I was away: Lauren Drain, a former member of Westboro Baptist Church, was married early last month, something we found out about after she posted pictures of the ceremony on Reddit. While her “God Hates Fags” church members weren’t there to support her (or, thankfully, protest), two of her “church sisters” who also escaped the cult were. Check out this picture and try not to smile: [Click headline for more…] Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses my five favorite books about atheism: If you’d like to check out those five books, just click the links below! Atheism for Dummies by Dale McGowan Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible by Steve Wells Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney We’d love to hear your thoughts on the project — more videos will be posted soon — and… Read more