'I Sold My Soul on eBay': Interview with Atheist Hemant Mehta

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Which churches did you like best and why?

There's a couple of churches that I really liked. I thought Joel Osteen's was really good. A lot of atheists make fun of me for that.

I know a lot of Christians disagree with me on that because they see him as “Christian lite.” But I thought his message was just one of optimism, even if it is the prosperity gospel.

He makes you feel good. And when I wake up on a Sunday, if I'm with my parents, Joel Osteen is on the TV because my mom likes listening to him. [He] just reaches out to people, whether or not you really believe in God. And he doesn't reference God or the Bible a lot. I think that's for good reason.

I've been to Willow Creek a few times. I really like that church. I love the sermons that they have. They do reference the Bible a lot more, but you walk out of there thinking about your life and what you can do better. I download their podcast. I download Mars Hill with Rob Bell sometimes. It's fun to listen to.

But I was listening to an older Willow Creek podcast [by] Bill Hybels about the myths of being gay. One of those myths was that being gay is not a choice. He was saying, "That's not true," basically--that it is a choice. I'm listening and thinking, this is one of the problems we have in this country and it's being propagated by this church.

And that depresses me. They also promote intelligent design--or many of their pastors do, anyway. I don't think they really seek out good scientific information on that stuff.

So on a lot of those issues, there are things I really disagree with.

There were a couple of smaller churches that I really liked, [such as] a house church in Yorkville, Illinois. [The pastor there] was trying to form another community. I have a Web site, friendlyatheist.com. He comments on there a lot and always has something good to say from a Christian perspective, so much so that I actually asked him if he would just kind of do a Q&A, like “Ask a Christian Pastor.” People submitted questions and he responded to every single one of them. Atheists said, "Wow, I didn't know there were Christians that thought like that."

And you had other people saying, "Oh, he's not a true Christian."

Which churches did you like least and why?

There was a church where they had the big-screen monitors everywhere--[it was] a high school gym, essentially. You don't need big-screen TVs to watch the pastor when he's not that far away from you.

The program we were given for the day basically had the outline of what [the pastor] was going to talk about with blanks written down. This is not what was written in there, but this is an example: God is ____. And then, during the sermon, he would say, “God is good. Write that down.” He actually said that.

And you would fill in the blank.

Yes. It was so childish.

You receive letters from people. Could you describe some?

I don’t get a lot of “You're going to hell” at all. That's very different from a lot of atheist authors.

I've gotten several letters from Christians, some [of whom are] pastors who are reading it in their church book club or something. And they said, "Our church is working to make sure that people that come to our church are not turned off and they know the reasons why we're doing things."

[But] some of them are just funny. I got a letter from one woman who said, “I know Satan is real because he left a message on my answering machine.” I wrote her back and said, “Did you star-69 the number or save the tape? Because I'm sure we could find an explanation for this.”

One person wrote, “I just want you to know, if you use physics, if you understand the laws of physics, bumblebees can't fly. They fly because God wants them to.”

I responded with, “Actually, here's a Wikipedia link to bumblebees and the section about how they do fly and here's another actual science Web page that explains why bumblebees fly despite that myth.”

She writes back and says she's not going to look at the link, she just has faith that God helps them fly.

That's so depressing. They don't even want to listen to what I have to say. But I really don't get a lot of those.

At the end of the book, you talk about what it would take to convince you or why you were not convinced.

I don't know any atheists that are saying, “There is no God, I will never pay attention to the evidence.” I don't know a single atheist that thinks that way, even though that's the stereotype. Atheists say, “I don't believe in God. But if you show me the evidence, I'll look at it, I'll think about it.”

One of the things that would convince me that there's maybe some supernatural power at work is a miracle. If I saw a real miracle that really had no explanation, I would have to second-guess my atheism.

I've gotten emails that said, "Here's a miracle." Every example they give has a perfectly logical explanation to it. You hear stories about people saying, "I have a friend of a friend who saw someone's amputated arm grow back." Of course, they were never there and I never saw that on YouTube. Someone get a video camera. That would be nice.

But if I actually saw that firsthand, that would go against everything I think is true about the world.