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 Long Island Secular Parenting Forum is putting together a one-day conference for non-religious parents who want to learn more about how to raise kids without faith. The speakers are fantastic — most of them are brand new to our movement — and the cost for the full day is under $25. The event takes place on Saturday, September 21 in Garden City, New York, and you’ll want to register as soon as you can before it gets booked up! Read more
Today’s New York Times features an article on Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, the skeptic who was assassinated earlier this week, presumably because his debunking of supernatural claims angered a few too many people… The article is a glowing tribute to what he accomplished in his life and how far India still has to go: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Jeremiah Camara is an author and filmmaker whose latest project, a documentary called Contradiction, explores the impact faith has had on African-American communities: Contradiction explores the paradox of an abundance of churches coupled with the great number of societal ailments in Black communities and seeks to find if there is a correlation between high praise and low productivity. Camara talks to the faithful and the faithless to determine the empirical benefits of prayer, worship and religious loyalty. I asked Camara to tell me more about the film and what inspired him to make it. This is what he said (via email): [Click headline for more…] Read more
Around midnight late Thursday night, a small explosion went off near the Mingus Park Vietnam War Memorial cross in Coos Bay, Oregon: There were no injuries. The memorial itself is still standing, but with some damage. There are no suspects yet. There’s no established motive. We pretty much know nothing about this incident other than “it happened.” So, of course, atheists are already being blamed for it because they once challenged the constitutionality of it: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Earlier in the week, I posted about a wonderful website from programmer Daniel G. Taylor called BibViz. It showed you all the biblical contradictions in one easy-to-see visualization and allowed you to click on specific ones for more information. Daniel is improving the site daily and the latest iteration of it allows you to sort the contradictions by color, by the book in the Bible, and by the type of contradiction we’re talking about. Here’s what I found when I selected the Book of Matthew, filtered for contradictions about Jesus, and sorted those contradictions by color: [Click headline for more…] Read more