1. Matthew Wade Dillahunty was born on March 31,1969 and is an American atheist activist and former president of the Atheist Community of Austin, a position he held from 2006 to 2013.
20 Facts About Matt Dillahunty
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Between 2005 and October 2022, Dillahunty was host of the televised webcast The Atheist Experience.
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Matt Dillahunty formerly hosted the live Internet radio show Non-Prophets Radio and founded the counter-apologetics project Iron Chariots.
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Matt Dillahunty is a regularly invited speaker, or debate participant, for local secular organizations and university groups as part of the Secular Student Alliance Speakers Bureau.
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Matt Dillahunty spent eight years in the US Navy before leaving to work in the field of computer software design.
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Matt Dillahunty later became a founding member of the Counter-Strike team Clan Killers 3 and participated in early Cyberathlete Professional League events and the QuakeCon 1997 event.
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Matt Dillahunty first co-hosted The Atheist Experience in March 2005 and would go on to become a regular host of the program.
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Matt Dillahunty immediately moved over to The Line, another YouTube channel focused on religious debates.
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Matt Dillahunty is one of the subjects of the documentary films My Week in Atheism by director John Christy, and Mission Control Texas.
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Matt Dillahunty has no University degrees and did not attend seminary.
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In 2018, Matt Dillahunty participated in a discussion with Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson in which they encountered areas of disagreement about religion, specifically its relationship with values and culture.
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One of Matt Dillahunty's recurring themes has been the superiority of secular morality over religious morality.
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The debate took place at the 2012 Texas Freethought Convention, with Matt Dillahunty debating Kristine Kruszelnicki.
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Matt Dillahunty used bodily autonomy as his primary argument for abortion rights.
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In March 2014, Matt Dillahunty debated Clinton Wilcox, who is not a member of Secular Pro-Life, though the debate was advertised on their blog.
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The aftermath led to a falling out with the organization, and Matt Dillahunty announced in a Facebook post that he would not debate them in public again.
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Matt Dillahunty said at the American Atheists convention in Austin in 2013 that the closest thing he has to a motto is "to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible," taking his inspiration from David Hume.
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Matt Dillahunty sees atheism as a subset of skepticism, and he does not see why skepticism should not address religious claims, something that has become a point of controversy in the skeptic community.
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In 2011, Matt Dillahunty was awarded the Atheist of the Year award, nicknamed the "Hitchie" for Christopher Hitchens, by Staks Rosch writing for Examiner.
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Matt Dillahunty received the 2012 Catherine Fahringer Freethinker of the Year Award from the Freethinkers Association of Central Texas.