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.
You may remember from this past August how Mary’s Gourmet Diner in Winston-Salem, North Carolina gave customers a 15% discount if they were seen praying before a meal: Even though the discount was supposedly open to people of all faiths, it was clearly geared toward Christians and offered no alternatives for atheists. Read more
Last week marked the release of a new documentary called The Principle… which is better known as the movie that claims Copernicus was wrong about the whole “Earth revolves around the sun” thing. Star Trek’s Kate Mulgrew is the narrator, but after finding out what the movie was really about, she distanced herself from it immediately, saying on Facebook, “I am not a geocentrist.” Scientists like Lawrence Krauss and Michio Kaku are also featured in the movie, but they’ve made it clear they didn’t know what the movie was really about either. So you can imagine my surprise when I received an email last week offering me an interview with the film’s producer Rick DeLano. Read more
Ken Ham, who’s still not my friend, is unhappy with American Atheists’ recent billboard campaign: … it’s the atheists who are destroying children’s lives by trying to force their anti-God, meaningless religion on generations of kids. People need to understand that atheists are not trying to stop children from being taught religion — they just don’t want them being taught the Christian religion, because they want to impose their own atheist religion on them. That’s… just plain dumb. If I wanted children to become atheists, the best way to do it would be to expose them to as many religions as possible, including the most popular one in the U.S. Once they saw how similarly silly they all were, they’d want nothing to do with any of them. (At least in theory.) But there’s no need to exclude Christianity from that mix. But here’s my biggest problem with Ken Ham’s rant. Read more