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.
Mitch Kahle, founder of the Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church, has been a successful activist for a few years now: In 2010, he protested an invocation prayer in the Hawaii State Legislature and won a lawsuit after being roughed up and arrested by police for “disorderly conduct.” Last year, after a public school partnered up with a local church to raise money for a Christian charity, he wrote a letter to the Department of Education and stopped the Constitutional violation. This is a guy who knows how to stand up for his principles, even if they’re unpopular. Now, along with his partner Holly Huber, he’s tackling his biggest case yet. [Click headline for more…] Read more
This is a guest post by Sean McGuire. Sean lives in Montreal with his wife and young son. He blogs under the pseudonym Godless Poutine at My Secret Atheist Blog, which is becoming less and less a secret every day. … Some readers of this blog may recall Cathleen O’Grady’s excellent guest post The Less Than 1%: How Uganda’s Atheists Are Fighting Back. It’s about how atheists and secular-minded people, a tiny minority in the African country, are striving to make things better for their community: In many countries around the world, religious groups are pushing for conservative social policies and retaining their grip on society by dominating the public discourse and provision of social services. In Uganda, an extraordinarily religious country, the small but vocal atheist movement is pushing back — hard. Uganda is at a crucial crossroads now as a society. American Christian fundamentalist churches and other organizations have sent waves of evangelists to this country. To some degree, they have brought about rampant and violent persecution of gays and lesbians. It is now unsafe to be publicly gay in this country — people have been killed. This is, of course, the home of the Kill the Gays legislation. [Click headline for more…] Read more
***Update***: We’ve posted this in the past. If you’ve already responded, there’s no need to do it again. Thanks! … Every now and then, the writers on this site will be working on a post about, say, Creationism being taught in a high school biology class… and we realize it would be great if we could talk to an atheist who teaches high school biology! Maybe we want to quote you in the post. Or (more likely) we just need to ask you a question about high school science curriculums in general. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Joshua Kelly, like so many of us, has a problem with religion — especially organized religion. He has written a series of essays on the subject for his excellent new book Oh, Your god!: The Evil Idea That is Religion (Dangerous Little Books, 2013): In the excerpt below, Kelly (who blogs at An Unbelieving Voice) discusses religious attitudes toward sex (Keep reading afterwards for your chance to win a copy of the book!): [Click headline for more…] Read more
