Hemant Mehta, and several of his radical atheist colleagues, are leaving Patheos to set up yet another place where atheist bloggers bloviate. I wonder what made them run off. What will make their site different from, say……FTB?
Anyway, Mehta claims he’ll be tweeting in the meantime because he doesn’t have anything else to do with his life other than post. It figures. Told you long ago that one of the main problems with acivists is that they have too much free time on their hands.
Shadow To Light 
Here’s what the Religion News Service gives as the reason why the fifteen atheist authors left Patheos for pastures new; article title and subtitle:
If anti-Theists could do that, they would be welcomed on BBC Radio’s week-daily “Thought for the Day” slot, along with those many and diverse regular speakers who each represent a religious viewpoint found in the UK; but they haven’t and they aren’t; I understand that Richard Dawkins’ rabid attack-dog approach on the one time something like that was trialed was emphatic warning to the BBC not to.
The RNS article comments that the authors will be seeking to create a sense of community, that the Sunday Assembly movement (which tried to create that) has waned markedly — more, and quicker, than US Christianity has, I observe — and that:
A regular plea from Hemant Mehta over the years has been that his readers should come together to form a coherent, unified voting bloc (in opposition to that of the Evangelical Christian voting bloc), a coherent, unified voting bloc which politicians cannot ignore when formulating policy and deciding decisions. That’s a regular plea his readers equally regularly ignore, as internally evidenced by the regularity and unchanging wording (in paraphrase, at any rate) of Mehta’s pleas: he’s getting nowhere.
Reading between the lines, Friendly Atheist is not just regarded as a hate blog by Michael, Friendly Atheist is regarded as a hate blog by Patheos.
And Patheos evidently considers Hemant Mehta to be a hate-blogger.
Smart-alec atheists often quip that atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby, yet folks like Mehta and Myers somehow expect Progressive attitudes to follow from atheism exactly as though it were a religion with such values. There’s actually quite a bit to unpack here. In some sense, the smart-alecs are right: atheism is not a religion; for symmetry, neither is theism. There are, however, theistic religions and atheistic religions. So, on the one hand they want to dodge classification as a religion, and on the other hand they expect fealty to their religion if you fall into the atheist category. The sheer inconsistency aside, this seems to fit with the general modus operandi of the contemporary Progressive in that they bluntly expect such fealty based on categories like ethnicity.
As for Mehta’s categorisation as a hate-blogger, well duh. He’s an anti-theist first and foremost, and although he used to pretend there was a positive aspect to his atheism (thus “friendly atheist”), those days are long gone, and the name persists through a combination of inertia and a lack of concern for honesty. If he wants to air his hatred publicly, it makes sense to have a platform where that is an explicitly permitted activity. Go ahead and hate with gusto, Mehta: I have scriptural reason to think that God prefers passionate anti-theism over “lukewarm” behaviour in any case.
I’ll add and comment on the RNS last paragraph, which quoted Hemant Mehta’s “high hopes”:
Mehta calls it “digital expertise”, where the context indicates strongly that he means “financial expertise”. But what part of “business-savvy” involves shutting down blogs and their earning power for the more than three weeks since the 14 December announcement of moving to the OnlySky platform — more than three weeks of no or low income, and if there’s a firm (or even provisional) start date I’ve missed it. How business-savvy is that?
Or in Mehta’s phrasing, how much digital expertise does that evidence?