Missionary goes to Amazon to convert, becomes atheist

[Ranting Randy]

* A Christian missionary meets a remote Amazon tribe to convert them, and, instead, they cause him to become atheist.

Inside the Pirahã World: Deciphering the Amazon’s Most Enigmatic Language

Only a little here about the missionary's conversion but it is quite a story.

[defacto7]

1. It is Beautiful. It is sad.

Defacto says It is like a film. The film is At Play In the Fields of the Lord.
I will write without recursion. It's difficult. To write without recursion opens my eyes. To write without recursion puts me in the present. My thoughts are equal.

It's definitely a different way of thinking about things.

It seems humans will never learn. We're still making the same mistakes forcing the power culture upon the weaker thereby losing a chance to learn important lessons we've missed all along. The lack of scientific intercourse just sickens me.

[Warpy]

2. Don't do what the video's protagonist did

and assume these people are Rousseau's noble savages, living in a state of nature and perfect happiness. There are only 400 or so of them left due to disease and likely loss of territory. Who knows? Maybe the school, the clinic and a bare minimum of mod cons including a latrine for sanitation will help them increase their numbers and thus their territory, improving their odds of having their people survive longer term.

As for the shunning of linguistic unorthodoxy, this happens over every branch of study and reflects a mindset that the answers have been found so hallelujah, we only have to learn those and skip all the hard work it took to come up with them. Some people are just plain lazy like that and get monumentally offended when some upstart comes along, pokes holes in the theories, and then has the audacity to prove his case. Eventually he wins, but usually not until he's old and grey. Chomsky's role is to defend his toeory, so don't be too hard on him. The acolytes are the lazy buggers.

[defacto7]

5. I don't think I'd go to your Rousseau analogy

with Everett's opinion or my own. He seemed pretty level minded. As for myself, I think we could learn a great deal from humans that are far removed from our failing modern culture. I'm not for pulling them into the 21st century at a whim anymore than I'm for us going back to the stone age. Sure, help them with sanitation, vaccines, other medical needs ... but television? Give me a break! I also surmise that the only reason they are being educated is so they can read the bible. That's how it usually works. And eventually they can become hard working members of modern society by slash burning the forest so they can raise cattle and plant corn for ethanol.

[Warpy]

6. I didn't say there was nothing to learn from them

He said himself that their ability to live totally in the present and the way their language reflected that made it the language of happiness, among other things. Obviously their people are under a great deal of stress from diminished numbers and diminished territory, so I would strongly suggest he knock the dust off those rose colored glasses of his.

Obviously he was denied access to these people because of the Brazilian government's outreach program supplying them with the things I mentioned. Schooling that is of no use to them will be forgotten quickly, but improved sanitation might increase infant and child survival rates. No culture should be kept in stasis to become a living museum for outsiders to study. We don't know how these tribes will change or if they'll change much, at all.

[defacto7]

7. I think your assessment is a bit unfair

and I have to disagree with much of what you said but that's fine. I'll just leave it there.

Be well, Warpy.

[Warpy]

8. Perhaps you need to watch the video again

and listen to what I pointed out.

[defacto7]

9. Perhaps. Thank you. n/t

[DFW]

3. It's a new version of an old story, and it keeps getting repeated because established theory tolerates no deviation

In 1793, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison traveled to Long Island to try to preserve a dying indigenous language. By the time they got there, there was only one native speaker of the Unkechaug language left. I have heard no reference to it in decades.

That Everett has been so punished by both his family and the Brazilian government is sickening. Cruelty seems to find new ways of manifesting itself as long as there are people who fear their theories and their orthodoxies being challenged.

[defacto7]

4. Here's my suspicion

as to why Everett was barred from returning to the Pirahã people, for whatever it's worth. I sincerely doubt that the linguistics/university community had anything to do with it. I think some religious zealot or zealots confronted the government officers demanding he not be allowed to spread his godless atheism to these poor ignorant lost souls. The officers in charge probably would look the other way under other circumstances, but being good Brazilian Catholics they would be torn between reason and their beliefs. Allowing a confessed atheist to reinforce an ancient ungodified way of life that jeopardized the Pirahã's eternal souls could be some kind of mortal sin. To add, there seems to have been an influx of money from somewhere.

Everett probably irked the religious community that originally sent him to Brazil in the first place. It would be their duty to bring righteous indignation to bear. And then there are disgruntled family members who are still believers along with anti-science anti-reason hordes that still lurk in the dark ages.

Who are the real primitives: those who live a simple fearless and happy existence that encompasses ideas that could improve our own culture or those who have subjugated themselves to their fear of god and thus are compelled to subjugate everyone else to their narrow primitive beliefs?