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.
This is the first line of a description for the book A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel (Strange Violin Editions): The summer after her freshman year at all-Mormon Brigham Young University, Marguerite Farnsworth falls in love with philosophy by way of falling in love with an atheist philosophy student. Blasphemous! I like where this is going… Author Therese Doucet has some experience with the subject since she’s an ex-Mormon herself. She was kind enough to offer a slightly risqué excerpt… Read more
Quick: What are these? If you said Candy Corn… you’re apparently wrong. Rebekah Kuschmider of the Washington Times found that out when she went shopping recently: I saw a bag of candy corn in the prematurely erected Halloween display in my grocery store, and needless to say, I had to get closer to investigate this… when I got closer to the display I realized the bag I saw contained not loose candy corn that could be scooped up by the… Read more
You wouldn’t think there are a lot of atheist groups at “religious” campuses, but a number of religiously-rooted schools have pretty diverse populations and they support the freedom for atheists groups like ours to thrive. Now, there’s one more to add to the growing list. Harrison Hopkins, a student who made news as a high school senior last year when he stopped a public prayer from occurring at his graduation, is now a freshman at Presbyterian College in South Carolina…. Read more
The first mainstream media article is now up regarding how the American Cancer Society rejected a potential $500,000 from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation because it would have involved atheists doing the fundraising. You can read background on the story here, here, and here. The American Cancer Society has rejected an atheist group’s bid to field a national team to raise money for cancer research, and organizers suspect it’s because of the volunteers’ godless beliefs. … The American Cancer Society said… Read more
Here in Illinois, the state mandates that we have a Moment of Silence in the classroom every day. (At my school, we do it over the loudspeakers during morning announcements.) That law was called the “Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act” until state officials revised its name to make it less Christian-y. It’s unenforceable and there’s no penalty for not doing it… but it’s still part of the law. Anyway, local activist Rob Sherman and his daughter Dawn have been… Read more
