Welcome to Part 9 of my 20 part series “Better Know a Speaker!” Today’s speaker: Hemant Mehta, the fighting Friendly Atheist!

If you haven’t heard of Hemant already, shame on you. His blog Friendly Atheist has been required reading among nonbelievers for years now, and he really is damned friendly, and he was good enough to let us auction him off for the grand sum of $70 at our fundraising party a couple of weeks ago!

Hemant is the Chair of the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) Board of Directors.

He attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he graduated with honors in both Mathematics and Biology. While there, he also helped establish their first secular student group, Students WithOut Religious Dogma (SWORD). He is now earning his Masters in Math Education at DePaul University.

He has worked with the Center for Inquiry and is the SSA representative to the Secular Coalition for America. He is also on the board of Foundation Beyond Belief, a charity organization targeting non-theistic donors.

Hemant was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal during his journey as the “eBay Atheist” and his book about the experience, I Sold My Soul on eBay (WaterBrook Press), was released in 2007.

He currently works as a high school Math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago.

Hemant’s presentation is titled “How the Religious Right Went After Me… and Lost!” In it, he will regale us with the epic tale of the time, last fall, when a right-wing Christian group tried to get him fired from his teaching job because of the contents of his website. He’ll explain how he came out of the ordeal even stronger, with his job as secure as ever.

It will, it seems, be an epic tale about Epic Fail. Go Hemant!

Check back here soon for part 10 of “Better Know a Speaker!”

–Speaker Conjurer Don

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