Friday, April 13, 2007

The Friendly Atheist hits the press

Hemant Mehta - the Friendly Atheist and author of I Sold My Soul on eBay hit my "atheist" Google news filter with an article in the Chicago Reader titled The Atheist Who Went to Church. I'm pre-ordered for Mehta's book.

The coverage is favorable.

He’s disturbed by the biblical verse “Every knee shall bow” and flabbergasted by Christians who maintain silence while extreme fundamentalists say God visits disasters upon unbelievers.

But Mehta, a 24-year-old high school math teacher, uses a beatitudes bookmark. He blogs as the “Friendly Atheist” at friendlyatheist.com, and the Christian blog awaitingrain.typepad.com includes him on its blogroll. When he met prosperity-gospel preacher Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now) at a church* he gushed, “Joel, I’m an atheist, and my mom, well, she’s not a Christian, but we’re huge fans!” His own first book, I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist's Eyes, is being published by Waterbrook, an evangelical Christian division of Random House.

Mehta's blog is a great read. It is one of the few that I read "religiously". I'm pre-ordered for Mehta's book. You can do the same from his website.

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1 comment:

vjack said...

I'm going to have to look into this Google news filtering you describe. It sounds useful.