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.
Did you ever hear the story of how the band Van Halen had a line in their contract rider stipulating that a bowl of M&Ms had to be backstage before a show… but there couldn’t be any brown M&Ms in it? The request wasn’t there just for the hell of it; it served a practical purpose. If there were brown M&Ms in the bowl, that meant the local crew hadn’t read through the contract. If they hadn’t read through the contract, they might have also missed out on checking some very important technical details, which could have ultimately led to minor or major problems during the performance. The principle was that if you got the little things wrong, you probably screwed up the big things, too. That’s what was going through my mind when I read Luke Dittrich’s fantastic takedown of Dr. Eben Alexander in Esquire (the story is behind a $1.99 paywall). Alexander is the man who claimed to have visited Heaven while nearly dead, only to come back, write a book about it (Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife), and rake in the cash. [Click headline for more…] Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, answers the question: Do atheists drink more? It’s part of a larger series of questions dealing with atheism and morality. Do we swear more than religious people? Do we have more sex than they do? Are those inherently bad things? 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
A few months ago, I wrote about a project that KellyAnne Kitchin and Jenn Gauthier were working on. They were concerned that a lot of the material made for homeschooling parents like them was written from a Young Earth Creationist, the-Bible-must-be-true perspective. They wanted more secular resources for their kids, so they began a campaign to compile and spread materials with actual educational value. Now, Kimberly Winston of the Religion News Service has written about their plight: [Click headline for more…] Read more
True story: One of my work colleagues emailed me the following video, (jokingly) adding, “You’re doing it wrong.” The video shows some crazy atheist barefoot jogger screaming at a preacher at UC Berkeley. In the first minute alone, the unnamed atheist tells the preacher he should be going to prison and calls all religious people (a.k.a. “God-botherers”) anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, and war criminals… before screaming “Atheism forever!” Later in the video, he yells, “Christians are responsible for slavery!” [Click headline for more…] Read more
Remember Arizona State Rep. Juan Mendez? He’s the 28-year-old atheist Democrat who delivered a secular invocation on the floor of the House (“I would like to ask that you not bow your heads…”), so enraging some of his colleagues that one of them delivered two Christian invocations the next day. A couple of weeks ago, Mendez spoke at the Secular Student Alliance conference in Las Vegas. Video of his talk is now online: [Click headline for more…] Read more