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.
As of this week, the Seattle Atheists have four different ads circulating on twelve buses throughout the city proclaiming that “1 in 4 is an atheist”: I love the look of the ads… but I cannot figure out where they’re getting this 1 in 4 number. The closest thing I can find is this excerpt from a survey done by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life: Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with… Read more
This is a guest post by Lisa. [Personal information has been removed.] … I used to believe global climate change wasn’t real. Raised in a conservative, orthodox Christian church, denial went with the territory. Along with evolution and dinosaurs, climate change fell into the camp of liberal lies. For many, it is unfathomable that people still deny the existence of global climate change and the human contribution. Unfathomable — but true. In fact, the denial of climate change is still… Read more
The UGAtheists at the University of Georgia in Athens is still trying to stop sectarian prayers from being recited during graduation. The prayer makes several references to “God” but not “Jesus”… so says the university by way of justification. So that makes it ok, right? Stephen Joiner, the public relations chair for UGAtheists, is leading a group of about 30 students, many of them members of UGAtheists, in the fight to remove the prayer said during graduation. The group has… Read more
The Root has been doing a marvelous job lately of giving voice to black atheists. In this article, Harvard professor Tommie Shelby talks about how he never “lost his faith”; he just flat-out rejected it: Though Harvard is often said to have ruined more good Negroes than bathtub gin, it was actually at Florida A&M University, a historically black university, that I went from being a devout Christian to being an atheist. … Many black people with whom I’ve talked… Read more
The Freedom From Religion Foundation just put up four billboards (rather, two basic images in four locations) in Salt Lake City to mark the holiday season — it marks their first billboard campaign in Utah: FFRF has more than 17,000 nonreligious members nationwide, but its Utah membership, at 102 persons, is on the slim side. FFRF hopes its billboard campaign will change that. “We want the nonreligious — freethinkers, atheists, agnostics and other skeptics — in Utah to know they… Read more