Hemant Mehta

Hemant Mehta (; born February 25, 1983) is an American author, blogger, YouTuber and atheist activist. Mehta is a regular speaker at atheist events, and he has been a board member of charitable organizations such as the Secular Student Alliance and the Foundation Beyond Belief.

Mehta used to run the Friendly Atheist blog on Patheos, in which he and his associates published articles several times a day, and he also co-hosts a weekly podcast called the Friendly Atheist Podcast. The blog stopped its activities on Patheos from December 14, 2021, because Mehta and some of his other associates moved to a new platform called OnlySky (Onlysky.media). Mehta currently also publishes on Substack.

On April 1, 2020, Mehta won his first appearance on the television game show Jeopardy! Mehta was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1983. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004 with a double degree in math and biology and began teaching in 2007. He acquired a master's degree in math education from DePaul University in 2010 and a national board certification in teaching in 2012. He taught high school math at Neuqua Valley High School until 2014 when he announced on Facebook and his blog that he had submitted his resignation to the school, citing that "As much as I love being in the classroom, the opportunities online are just a lot greater right now, and I don’t want to have any regrets down the road about not taking this chance while I have it." After his resignation, he stayed on as the head coach of the school's speech team.

Mehta was raised in the Jain faith. He became an atheist as a teenager. Seeking to learn more about what motivated many Americans to be religious, he decided to attend and take notes at a number of churches across the United States. He based his choice of churches to attend on the results of an eBay auction in which he offered his bidders, "I am an atheist. You can bid on where I go to church or a temple or a mosque, etc." Mehta's experiences at the churches became the basis for his book, I Sold My Soul on eBay.