Tag Archives: Christianity

book reviews, religion

Reposted review of I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Athiest’s Eyes

Here’s another reposted book review. It was written for Epinions.com on June 14, 2010, and appears here as/is. I’m still thinking about today’s fresh content.

eBay has changed the face of American commerce, making some rather unconventional methods of earning money available to people smart enough to come up with a clever gimmick. Hemant Mehta is one such clever guy. In January 2006, when he was 22 years old, Mehta came up with a very interesting moneymaking proposal. An atheist since he was 14 years old, Mehta held an auction to get eBayers to send him to church.

His proposal read as follows:

I’m a 22-year-old from Chicago. I stopped believing in God when I was 14. Currently, I am an active volunteer for a couple of different national, secular organizations. For one of them, I am the editor of a newsletter that reaches over 1,000 atheist/agnostic college students. I have written several Letters to the Editor to newspapers in and around Chicago, espousing my atheistic beliefs when Church/State issues arose. My point being that I don’t take my non-belief lightly. However, while I don’t believe in God, I firmly believe I would immediately change those views if presented with evidence to the contrary. And at age 22, this is possibly the best chance anyone has of changing me.

So here’s my proposal. Every time I come home, I pass this old Irish church. I promise to go into that church every day– for a certain number of days– for at least an hour each visit. For every $10 you bid, I will go to the Church for 1 day. For $50, you would have me going to mass every day for a week. (15)

Mehta continues by promising to go to church willingly and keep an open mind, yet not saying or doing anything inappropriate. He offers to volunteer with the church and interact with the people of the church and do his best to learn about the churchgoers’ beliefs. He also promises to maintain a diary, take photos, or secure any other type of proof the winning bidder desires in order to uphold his end of the bargain.

Proving that Americans love a good gimmick and are willing to pay for it, Mehta was successful in finding someone to pay him to attend church. The winning bidder of his auction was Jim Henderson, a minister from Seattle, Washington, who paid $504 to get Mehta to attend church. Mehta donated the money to the Secular Student Alliance, one of the organizations Mehta was involved with when he was a student.

Instead of just attending the old Irish church, however, Henderson opted to have Mehta try a variety of different churches and maintain his impressions on Henderson’s Web site, http://www.offthemap.com. And Mehta did make good on his end of the deal, visiting churches in four different states that ranged from mega-sized to small and intimate. Mehta’s eBay experiment led to his decision to write his 2007 book, I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Athiest’s Eyes.

My thoughts

This book wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be when I decided to buy it. I was under the impression that Mehta’s memoirs of an atheist sitting in church would be about just that… sitting in church. But it turns out I Sold My Soul on eBay is also about what makes an atheist tick. He offers some commentary on the atheist movement, as well as some insight as to why he gave up Jainism, the faith Mehta grew up in.

Mehta’s eBay experiment led him to attend some very well known megachurches, to include Ted Haggard’s New Life Church and Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church. Mehta offers his observations of what it was like for him as a non-believer. While I’m no atheist, I can understand where he was coming from, particularly when he writes of his experiences in the megachurches, a burgeoning American phenomenon that I personally find a big turn off. That being said, not all of Mehta’s observations are negative. He has good things to say about Joel Osteen, going as far as to quip “I may be an atheist, but I love Joel” (123). Based on Osteen’s constant presence on television over the past few years, so do a lot of other Americans.

Toward the end of the book, Mehta offers his thoughts on both what works and what’s wrong with typical Christian church services. I didn’t agree with all of Mehta’s insights; for example, he says he wishes there was less singing. I don’t attend church regularly anymore, but one of the one things I do enjoy about church services is the music. Mehta also complains that a lot of Christians have an intolerant attitude toward atheists.  I can agree with that statement.  On the other hand, Mehta also observes that a lot of churches offer valuable community outreach, which he claims to find commendable, and some of the pastors he met made sure their messages were very relevant.  The pastors who kept their messages useful to Mehta today stood the best chance of getting him to change his mind about religion and go back to church.

At the end of the book, Mehta writes an interesting chapter about what it would take to get him to convert. He writes that he still has unanswered questions about Christianity, though at this point, he’s still a devout atheist. As I was reading this chapter, I started to wonder why it should matter to most people whether or not Mehta chooses to believe in God. But then it occurred to me that for many devout Christians, it really does matter. And so, for those people, Mehta’s last words may be the most compelling in the book. I’m sure former teen heart-throb Kirk Cameron, who has famously become a devout Christian and even ambushed Mehta on a radio program, would want to know how to get him to believe and be “saved”.

This book includes a guide for discussion groups. I’m sure the guide is very useful for those who want to read this book as a group and toss around some ideas afterward. Mehta also offers some notes at the end of the book with clarifications and more resources, along with an invitation to join his personal blog, http://www.friendlyatheist.com.

Overall

I liked this book. I guess I would have enjoyed it more if it had been more focused on just the eBay auction and was written more like a story instead of a progress report, but I did find Mehta’s observations intriguing. Mehta has a friendly, honest, engaging voice; he’s intelligent and seems to have an open mind, and that’s very refreshing. One thing potential readers should know is that Mehta mostly confines his church attendance to Protestant denominations, which may or may not have affected his opinions.

I would recommend I Sold My Soul on eBay to those who are interested in learning more about Atheism, as well as those who find religion stimulating. I will warn, however, that this book takes a broader approach than I was expecting. It’s not as much as a memoir as I was thinking it would be, which may or may not be appealing to other readers.

As an Amazon Associate, I get a small commission from Amazon on sales made through my site.

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homosexuality

“Going straight…”

The month of June has been set aside to celebrate gay pride. I happen to have several gay relatives and many gay friends. For some reason, I’ve never been particularly homophobic, even though I grew up in a very conservative, Christian town and, despite having gay relatives, I come from a conservative Christian family. Maybe it’s because I watched a lot of Three’s Company when I was coming of age. There weren’t any actual gay characters or cast members; John Ritter, in his role of Jack Tripper, was simply tasked with acting “gay” so he could fool the landlords into letting him live with his two female roommates.

That show would probably not fly today. People are expected to be tolerant of homosexuality. And, over the past forty years, I have noticed that a lot of people are less freaked out by homosexuality… at least on the surface. Then, there are people who can’t or won’t accept homosexuality and feel the need to speak out about it.

Last week, I read an interesting blog post about Bible translations of the past. The author of the post wrote:

“I had a German friend come back to town and I asked if he could help me with some passages in one of my German Bibles from the 1800s. So we went to Leviticus 18:22 and he’s translating it for me word for word. In the English where it says “Man shall not lie with man, for it is an abomination,” the German version says “Man shall not lie with young boys as he does with women, for it is an abomination.” I said, “What?! Are you sure?” He said, “Yes!” Then we went to Leviticus 20:13— same thing, “Young boys.” So we went to 1 Corinthians to see how they translated arsenokoitai (original Greek word) and instead of homosexuals it said, “Boy molesters will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

This kind of changes everything, doesn’t it? That passage that homophobic people tend to trot out whenever they justify their disdain or outright hatred of homosexuality isn’t necessarily about homosexuality so much as it is child molestation. The blog author looked at other Bibles from other countries and found the same thing. The Bible calls out pederasty, not homosexuality. Also from the post:

“I also have a 1674 Swedish version and an 1830 Norwegian version of the Bible. I asked one of my friends, who was attending Fuller seminary and is fluent in both Swedish and Norwegian, to look at these verses for me. So we met at a coffee shop in Pasadena with my old Bibles. (She didn’t really know why I was asking.) Just like reading an old English Bible, it’s not easy to read. The letters are a little bit funky, the spelling is a little bit different. So she’s going through it carefully, and then her face comes up, “Do you know what this says?!” and I said, “No! That’s why you are here!” She said, “It says boy abusers, boy molesters.” And, in fact, in the Norwegian version, she pointed out, that if you were to line up boys of different ages and say which group of these boys is this referring to, it would be the 8-12 year old group. That was how the linguistics were working and it was obviously referring to the pederasty, not homosexuality!” 

This morning, one of my super Christian relatives posted a video that turned my stomach. It came from a faith promoting Web site called Faith It. The video starred a young woman named Emily who had identified as a lesbian and used to say that Christians shouldn’t judge. When her dad noticed a hickey on her neck, Emily told her father she was gay and dating women. She implies that she led a sinful lifestyle, perhaps not just because of being gay, but because of promiscuity and, perhaps, partying too much. She was very young at the time, and partying too much is what a lot of young people do. I wouldn’t say being a lesbian had much to do with that.

Emily then had an epiphany after attending a Bible study. According to the article my relative shared: “along with the drunkards and other sinners, she saw that those who engaged in homosexuality were also on the list of those who wouldn’t enter the kingdom of God. Thankfully, the following verse offered hope for her redemption — along with all those who would repent of their sinful nature, by the blood of Jesus Christ.” Emily then, apparently, had a change of heart and a change of her sexual preferences.

To those who say they were “born gay”, she says, “It’s not gay to straight. It’s lost to saved.” She says Jesus has to come to lead homosexuals to the “right affections”. God wants us to have families and to have a family the usual way, one must have a man and a woman. Or… at least that’s the easiest way to do it. Being in a homosexual relationship won’t lead to having a traditional family.

Frankly, I find that mindset really upsetting. Plenty of straight people are married and have no children. Sometimes, it’s by choice. Sometimes, it’s not. Even still, I think about homosexuals who have tried to go straight, yet never really love their partner in the way they should. That’s not fair to either party. It’s not right to marry someone and pretend to be attracted to them for the sake of making babies. In fact, it’s often a recipe for disaster, especially for the innocent children who are born to couples that don’t really love each other.

I’m not very close to my super Christian relatives. The older I get, the less I have in common with them. They’re all Trump supporters and, though they spend a lot of time reading the Bible and going to church, they don’t seem to be very Christlike. The relative who shared this video has a niece who is a lesbian. As far as I know, they’re still very close to her. She has a wife and a son. We also have a male cousin who is gay and has been in a committed relationship for over twenty years. I can’t help but wonder what it must be like in their immediate families, dealing with this kind of cognitive dissonance. You have a close loved one who is homosexual and lives the lifestyle, yet you post this kind of trash on social media?

Bill’s sister, who was adopted by his dad and stepmother, is a lesbian. For many years, her Catholic mother lamented that her daughter was destined to go to Hell, just because she loves women. My husband’s stepmother’s best friend is also a lesbian, yet she evidently believed (and perhaps still believes) that her loved ones are going to burn in eternity only because of whom they choose to love. My sister in law and her wife are wonderful, kind, decent people. I refuse to believe they’re going to Hell simply because they’re lesbians. It wouldn’t be right or natural for them to try to be straight. That would be disastrous for everyone involved. If Emily from the video is truly gay, her life will not be easy as she tries to be straight. And it won’t be easy for the men she’s involved with, either, or the children that might come from such a union.

Anyway… I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m disappointed. I don’t understand the extreme religious mindset of people who profess to be Christians, yet don’t act as Christ would. Many of the comments on that video are pretty disheartening and some are downright sickening. I think of all the people I’ve heard about who have suffered because they have been told being gay is unacceptable and wrong. And they have been mistreated simply because of whom they choose to love. In American Bibles, it says that homosexuality is “sinful”, but other Bibles are translated differently. Could it be that those who are pushing this narrative against homosexuals have fallen for an agenda pushed by an organization rather than following the actual word of God? Not that I profess to be an expert on the word of God. I sure as hell am not. It’s just that this attitude against consenting adults loving other consenting adults is strange to me.

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