An Atheist Goes To Church 1

Having rejected Jainism, Hemant Mehta went on the road to atheism. However, he wanted to be clear about his rejection of religion altogether. So he decided to check it out in a rather creative way, by selling his soul on eBay.

Hemant was raised in Jainism. When he started questioning his religion, it was “obvious” to him that he couldn’t ask those questions at the temple nor his parents (they were very religious). Lesson: we need to have an environment which not only allows for questions but adequately deals with them (which includes challenging the questioner in his/her assumptions).

Hemant, like a lot of atheist, has a fact-free definition of faith. Lesson: as I addressed in a recent talk, such a definition is really one reflective of the atheist materialist world view, not the Christian’s and we do need to ensure this is clearly and adequately pointed out.
He also had a stereotypical view of Christians from sources like The Simpsons or ex-Christians. Lesson: time for us to help them get more authoritative information.

Sold

Back to the auction. On the surface, it would seem like an act of fraud since atheists don’t believe in the spiritual dimension of reality. However, the “sale” of his soul was basically him letting people “buy” his time to attend or not attend a religious service. It could have gone either way as there were atheists bidding him not to go at all but they were in the minority, it was really Christians who were bidding at this auction. According to the saying “Put your money where your mouth is”, this says volumes doesn’t it?

Ultimately, it was a pastor who won the auction paying over $500. The deal was for every $10, Hemant would go to a service – this meant that Hemant was lined up for a year’s worth of church going, much more than he had bargained for.

What’s Good

This is where it gets interesting. Hemant was told by the winning pastor to not just go to his church but to go to many different kinds. The pastor picked for him a range of places from mega-churches, smaller churches to home fellowships. He also wanted Hemant to write about his experiences at these churches on his ministry’s website, turning this into an outsider atheist’s critique of churches.The following are points from that.

Good points:

• Churches are great at giving. He felt jealous that as an atheist, he didn’t have the same giving opportunity as Christians do.
  Lesson: Acts 20:35 comes to mind.
• He was impressed by the caring, embracing, community spirit and ability to help “total strangers” which was evident in some churches. It made it hard for him to embrace the atheist line that “religion isn’t just wrong, it’s actually bad”.
  Lesson: James 2:14-18 comes to mind.
• Even though he “didn’t connect” with the spiritual content (God, Bible etc.) in a lot of the sermons he heard, there were still things he could take away from them. He said it was hard to find an inspirational, uplifting message as an atheist outside of a church context. He said he “wished there was an atheist equivalent of that.”
  Lesson: It’s hard to draw any clear conclusions from this point without more personal insights but perhaps the lesson here is to ensure we help “join the dots to real life” in what we share in our messages. After all, Christianity isn’t just some idea or social club, it’s a living, breathing, real-time front-line relationship with God. As for there being “no atheist equivalent”, well that’s because by definition, there can’t be.

His experiences were not all good and therein lies the opportunity for improvement. In part 2, I’ll look into that.

 

Many thanks to my Pastor, Jonathan Mok for pointing out the interesting and informative talk on which these articles are based.

 

Image©Kevin Tam