by Jim Henderson

[photopress:jim_sign_atheist.jpg,thumb,alignright]About a month ago I was at an airport in Chicago when I got an email from my friend Joe Myers. He sent me a link to a story about a guy who was "selling his soul" on Ebay. Joe knows about my strange hobby of interviewing "lost" people so he thought I would be interested.

I had a couple of hours to kill so I went online and read about Hemant Mehta. Hemant is not only a “lost” person he’s an atheist/lost person. So I bid.

Pretty soon the bidding started climbing into the $50 range (my personal threshold) and about that time I got an email from a newspaper in Chicago saying they wanted to talk with me.

Never one to shy away from free publicity I called Dan at the Daily Southtown. Dan had a 4 PM deadline and wanted to write something about Hemant and his attempt to sell his soul. “Why are you doing this” he wondered (the set up I live for) “We’ve actually been doing this kind of thing for about five years” I explained. We hire non believers to go to church and do a survey so churches can know how the people they say they are trying to reach feel about their “services” (we call it a service don’t we?).

Dan went on to write the first of what has now become literally hundreds of stories about Off The Map hiring an Atheist. We continued to bid and with the help of some savvy eBay coaches (and Jesus – yes I’m still a Christian) managed to win the bid for Hemant’s atheistic attention in the last 6 seconds (it was really exciting to watch the numbers roll and know that we were going to make the 3 point shot to win the game with 6 second left on the clock BTW the winning bid was $504 which was our complete marketing budget for 2006. Donate to Off The Map

Wall Street Journal Calls
The next day I received an email from the religion reporter at the Wall Street Journal asking for an interview. Two days later I was back in Chicago to meet Off The Map’s first atheist/employee Hemant Mehta and the WSJ reporter who had flown in from Boston. We spent two days putting the deal together, attending church, and laughing a lot.

Since that time Hemant has surveyed five churches in the Chicago area. He will visit another 5-10 churches in the next month or so to complete his assignment for Off The Map.

Behind the scenes Hemant and I were working closely with the WSJ to prepare the story so that it could make the front page which it did in the March 9th issue. “On eBay an Atheist Puts His Own Soul on the Auction Block”.

Save Hemant
The other bidders competing for Hemants soul included Atheists who wanted to save Hemant from having to go to church and on fire Christians who knew for certain if he would hear their pastor or come to their church he would definitely get saved. We just wanted to hire him to convert Christians.

Off The Map is in the business of helping Christians learn how to be normal. Let’s face it – we have a pretty weird reputation out their in the open marketplace of ideas and frankly, we’ve given them plenty to work with. Besides legitimate points of disagreement we’ve offered up language they don’t understand, inward looking communities and a belief centric religion they find unattractive.

Off The Map wants to help change that perception, we would like to contribute to a movement that aspires to help Christians become better human beings and make our world a better place. One of the most effective ways we’ve found to do that is to invite those who disagree with us to simply tell us why and then to offer some suggestions for how we could improve, not just our church services but more importantly, ourselves.

So, we did not hire Hemant to convert him and I told him that. I told him that if he got converted it would have to be “off the clock” (btw one thing that is seriously missing in our work as christians is humor)

Atheists = SATAN
One thing you need to know about me is that I am seriously in love with Jesus and see the world in two groups, those who follow Jesus and those who don’t. Whether they self identify as non believers, non christians, agnostics or atheists makes absolutely no difference to me. However, some of my fellow believers seem to see “red” when they hear the word atheist. Somewhere along the line they learned to correlate the term Atheist with SATAN. I don’t know why atheists got chosen to be the worst of the worst of infidels in the minds of (fundamentalist) Christians but having had thirty days to hear the views of atheists I can say with certainty that they get the message loud and clear. So if our job was to make atheists feel like we hate them we can say in the words of our President “Mission Accomplished”

Atheists and Christians Unite
We aren’t called Off The Map for nothing. We decided to take this story public and started a blog. We told Hemant that rather than sending him to 50 churches (his original offer) we would prefer he spent some of his time writing for us online. The otmatheist.com blog has received thousands of hits and hundreds of comments in the past 30 days. We have even formed something of a community of Atheists and christians who respect and honor one another and even protect the “sacred” space we have created from fundamentalistic interlopers (be they atheist or christian).

Ink
Because of the brilliantly written Wall Street Journal article we have received inquiries from Good Morning America, The Anderson Cooper Show and local radio programs. Hemant was interviewed on the Chicago CBS affiliate and was featured in the Chicago Sun Times. Hemant and I both appeared recently on The Big Story on the Fox News Channel. We have even gotten press in India.

Follow The Story
If you would like to stay current with this story check out the blog and post your comments and read Hemants surveys and pass this around.