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 video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, answers the question: Do you have a moral obligation to come out as an atheist? 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
Earlier tonight, Ed Markey (D) beat Gabriel Gomez (R) in a race to take over John Kerry’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. Markey, who’s been a Representative for the state since 1976, earned a grade of C on the Secular Coalition for America’s congressional scorecard in 2011. More recently, however, when the SCA put out a scorecard just for this special Senate election (PDF), they gave him (and his opponent) an A: [Click headline for more…] Read more
That’s some passive-aggressive note-writing there… “You accidentally grazed my car’s door handle and most people would just let that go without incident, but I’m annoying, so I’m going to forgive you LIKE JESUS WOULD!” Someone, please add that to the Giant List of Things That Have Never Converted Anybody to Christianity. (via Stuff Christians Like) Read more
They’re popping up everywhere. Dan Merica at CNN covers Greg Epstein’s congregation, part of the Humanist Community at Harvard University (HCH): A longtime advocate for community building, Epstein and his group of atheists have begun to build their Cambridge community and solemnize its Sunday meetings to resemble a traditional religious service. To Epstein, religion is not all bad, and there is no reason to reject its helpful aspects. “My point to my fellow atheists is, why do we need to paint things with such a broad brush? We can learn from the positive while learning how to get rid of the negative,” he said. For Epstein, who started community-building at Harvard nearly 10 years ago, the idea of a godless congregation is not an oxymoron. “We decided recently that we want to use the word congregation more and more often because that is a word that strongly evokes a certain kind of community — a really close knit, strong community that can make strong change happen in the world,” he said. “It doesn’t require and it doesn’t even imply a specific set of beliefs about anything.” [Click headline for more…] Read more
Every Independence Day since 2008, the Christian chain Hobby Lobby has run newspaper ads celebrating the “Christianity” of our Founding Fathers and how they supposedly wanted this to be a “Christian Nation.” This year, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is taking a page from their book and running a counter-ad-campaign celebrating our “godless Constitution” and how our Founding Fathers actually supported separation of church and state. The ad also says “In Reason We Trust”: [Click headline for more…] Read more