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 Kelley Freeman showed us last month, the best way to make the Four Horsemen — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett — appealing to women is to turn them into ponies.* Now, Kelley (of the Pastafarians at USC) and Katie Hartman (of the Missouri State branch of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) have teamed up to turn those ponies into something everyone can appreciate: Shot glasses! And they feature the lovable Four Horseponies! You… Read more
I got an email from reader Keith that’s worth sharing: I live in Austin, Texas. We are currently within 30 miles of several major wildfires fueled by months of severe drought and a day or two of high winds (mercifully subsided). The last estimate I saw predicted 500 homes destroyed in Bastrop County alone. I went to the Internet, where I found a couple of good pages suggesting ways to help. The Red Cross can always use cash, of course,… Read more
It’s the beginning of the school year and a lot of campus atheist groups are chalking the sidewalks and sitting behind tables at organization fairs to sign up new members. The Alabama Atheists and Agnostics have been around for two years and they’ve actually had a good run at the school considering how conservative the state is. Gordon Maples, an officer of the group, said everything seemed to be going well during the first tabling of the year: The table… Read more
One more result from the new report (PDF) put out by Brookings and the Public Religion Research Institute. It seems that the younger generation (18-30) is far more accepting of minorities of all kinds — including atheists — than those Americans 65 and older: … there is a relationship to education as well: 42 percent of those with no more than a high school education see the Bible as God’s literal word, a figure that falls by two-thirds to only… Read more
