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.
Churches are not places to ask questions, we all know that. If you doubt what the church believes, if you challenge the “wisdom” of the Bible, if you poke holes in the pastor’s arguments…let’s face it; you’re not the type of person they’re looking for. So you can guess how things went in Perham, Minnesota when Fikri Rahmat (from Indonesia) and Elshan Mirzazade (from Azerbaijan), both Muslim exchange students, attended a church service featuring speaker Walid Shoebat, a Muslim-turned-Christian who now goes around claiming (among other things) that Islam equates to terrorism. The boys wanted to go because they knew Shoebat is notorious for saying crazy things about their faith. Read more
Lauren Drain’s father visited Westboro Baptist Church over a decade ago while making a documentary film (which was tentatively titled Hatemongers). When he returned home a month later, he was a different man. He had internalized what they were preaching and eventually moved his entire family, including 14-year-old Lauren, to Kansas to become members of Fred Phelps’ church. Now, Lauren has written a book about her experience with the “God Hates Fags” family called Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (Grand Central Publishing, 2013). Read more
Back in December, the Iowa State Supreme Court made a unanimous and absurd decision (whether or not there was a legal basis for it). The backstory is this: Christian dentist James Knight worked for over a decade alongside his female assistant, Melissa Nelson. Their relationship was purely platonic, but Knight couldn’t deal with the fact that she was attractive (PDF): Read more