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 folks at Penny Arcade, the Series just released some bonus content from their Season 2 DVD and it involves an interesting discussion about how much (if any) religion you should teach your children: Just to be clear, the argument isn’t about teaching your children that religious beliefs are true — we know that’s absurd and no one should be advocating that. This is about religious education. Kids should know the basics about faith — the stories referenced in pop… Read more
Al Vernacchio teaches the best high school sex education class you’ll find anywhere — it’s honest, frank, and doesn’t shy away from answering the questions kids really want answered. My favorite excerpt from this New York Times article is the part where Vernacchio wonderfully links up sex and food: “So let’s think about pizza,” Vernacchio said to his students after they’d deconstructed baseball. The class for that day was just about over. “Why do you have pizza?” “You’re hungry,” a… Read more
Iowa Caucus voters are still very divided over which Republican candidate to vote for this January, and when you separate them by religious beliefs, the differences are even more striking: “That’s more the story than who’s ahead,” said Jim McCormick, chairman of the ISU Political Science Department, who coordinated the poll. “The number of people who are firmly committed to a candidate is really only 16.5 percent,” McCormick said. “A majority of them, 52-plus, are undecided and 30 percent are… Read more
The Denver-based alternative paper Westword has a cover story on Patheos and it provides a lot of insight into how the site began and where it’s going: Creating Patheos’s second layer involved bringing in established bloggers from multiple religions — and their readers. Site staffers identified the ten to twenty most-read bloggers in various traditions, starting with Catholic and evangelical and progressive Christians, but soon branching out to pagans and humanists (a catch-all for atheists, agnostics and other forms of… Read more
Sometimes, people in leadership positions just assume everyone believes in God. It’s not that they’re trying to force their religion onto you; they just don’t know any better — like a teacher who tells every student to stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, not understanding that it’s perfectly fine if a student doesn’t want to say that we’re living in a nation “Under God.” It’s even worse in the military — when commanding officers tell you to pray… Read more