Transcription
In 1977, Christian missionaries Daniel and Karen Everett ventured into the Amazon rainforest with their three children in tow and one big goal: translating the Christian Bible for a small, deeply isolated indigenous community of hunter-gatherers called the Paha and converting them to Christianity.
This would be difficult. Not a single Paha had ever been converted, and it wasn't for missionaries' lack of trying. The Protestant missionaries that had succeeded me, they started working with them in 1959. The first team with Wickliffe Bible Translators, which was the mission I was with, worked from 1959 to 1967. The next team worked from 1967 to 1976. And then I came in in 1977, and they had had absolutely no results whatsoever.
I read also the account of the first Catholic missionaries that worked with them in 1784, which abandoned them after just a couple of years as the most recalcitrant people they had ever encountered in the entire Amazon. No Westerner had ever managed to learn the notoriously difficult Paha language, which, in addition to developing in isolation from the rest of the world, is also tonal, meaning the pitch of a word can impact its meaning.
Daniel believed God had called him to the Paha, though, so he was totally confident that he would be able to meet the challenge and give them the greatest gift anyone could ever offer: the saving message of the gospel. "I was going to um tell them about they the fact that they don't need to fear death, that they're going to go to heaven after they die and and contribute my life in exchange for their happiness."
Everett describes the Paha as a peaceful, non-hierarchical community of hunter-foragers who take survival on a day-to-day basis. They share resources freely, keep few personal possessions, and by choice don't even store food or build complex shelters. He estimates that they spend about 15 hours a week working. That sounds nice. They live simply, but don't suffer from this way of life at all.
According to Everett, he said that in the seven years he lived with them, he doesn't think he ever saw a Paha adult miss a shot with their bow while hunting, not once. They are apparently so incredibly skilled in the land they live on so rich that they don't see a point in working more than they do and would rather just spend time hanging out and joking around with their friends. And as soon as Daniel began living with them, they apparently started joking around with him, too.
"Later that day when I was putting mustard that I had brought from the city on a bologna sandwich, you can see I was adapting very slowly. Um, a woman came up behind me and she said, 'Um, look, Dan's eating bird shit.' And, uh, I looked at the mustard and listened to the sound and I could see where she got that uh impression."
As Everett learned their language, he began realizing how unique it really is. They don't have specialized words for greetings, colors, or numbers. That's a little bit hard to fathom for me. Paha discourse centers around asking for and giving information in structurally straightforward sentences. Their language developed to convey direct and literal knowledge and therefore lacks words to describe many abstract concepts. Their grammatical structure excludes past and future tenses, which Everett says is compatible with their cultural focus on the day-to-day. And while they enjoy storytelling, the Paha don't engage with fictional narratives; they place such importance on experience and evidence that to even make a claim in the Paha language, one must include a citation within the grammar of the sentence.
"Well, Paha, like many American Indian languages, has a very complex verbal system. So Paha has 16 different suffixes that can go at the end of a verb. That gives 2 to the 16th power possible verb forms, and and that's a lot. That's more than 40,000. And of those things, three suffixes are very important, and those tell you how you got your evidence. So every verb has to have on it the source of the evidence. Did you hear about it? Did you see it with your own eyes, or did you deduce it from the local evidence? Uh, so if I say, 'Did John go fishing?' they can say, 'John went fishing heii,' which means I heard that he did. Or they can say, 'John went fishing u cigga,' and uh, that means I deduce that he did. Or they can say, 'John went fishing ha,' and that means I saw it. He went."
"In some respects, they're the ultimate empiricists."
"Yeah, you can probably see where this is going. How exactly do you share the gospel, which which is predicated on abstract concepts like sin and inherited guilt and penal substitutionary atonement? If the people listening don't care about abstractions, how do you even tell them the story of the supposed death and resurrection of Jesus 2,000 years ago, as written anonymously in an ancient language which only made it to you through a chain of endless translation and copying, if you have to give clear and direct citations for everything you say?"
"Well, when Daniel gained enough Paha language skills to try, things didn't work out the way he wanted."
"When you show them these things and you tell them what you believe, they believe you've got some reason for saying it. So, so they came around and they, a group of men at this other village said, 'Dan, um, so, so tell us a little bit more about Jesus. Is he, uh, is he brown like us, or is he white like you? And how tall is he? And, um, and and what sorts of things does he know how to do? Does he like to hunt and fish and stuff, or what does he do?' And I said, 'Well, you know, I don't know what color he is. I never saw him.' 'You never saw him?' 'No.' 'Well, um, your dad saw him then, cuz you can you can give information that was told to you by somebody who was alive at the time.' And I said, 'No, my dad never saw him.' They said, 'Well, who saw him?' And I said, 'Well, they're all dead. It was a long time ago.' 'Why are you telling us about this guy? If you never saw him and you don't know anyone who ever saw him, and those are the two basic forms of evidence for the Paha, why would you tell us about him? We don't want to hear about this.' So then I made, I I translated and I paid a Paha to repeat after me on the tape, the Gospel of Mark. So I did translate the Gospel of Mark, and and I had this Paha guy saying it, and it sounded pretty natural. We add a little music to it, hand-crank tape recorder, and I gave it to them and and I sat around a group of with a group of men around the fire, and they're playing this, and they're understanding it. I know they're understanding it because they're asking questions, and they say, 'Who's talking on this tape? Sounds like Pewatai.' And I said, I said, 'It is Pewatai.' And they said, 'He doesn't believe this stuff.' And he never saw Jesus either. So, um, that was the end of it. But as I..."
"You might have noticed a familiar name on the podium in some of these clips. It's the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Daniel Everett spoke at the FFRF National Convention back in 2009, and I'm fortunate to be able to use video of his talk here, thanks to FFRF. And you know who's speaking at the FFRF National Convention in 2026? Me. This year's convention is October 16th through the 18th at the Baird Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I know it's still a few months away, but this is a big opportunity for me, and I'm just too excited not to share this. If you're somehow not aware yet, the Freedom from Religion Foundation is a national church-state watchdog which protects Americans from unconstitutional religious privileging. They defend our rights to the freedom of and from religion, always. Right now, that especially means fighting the pervasive threat of Christian nationalism. We need nonprofits like them now more than ever. I became a member back in 2018 when I attended my very first FFRF conference, and I've remained a member ever since because they so consistently stand up for human rights and fight religious overreach in our government. Go become a member right now and support their expert legal team. The link is in the description and pinned comment. Thank you very much for sponsoring this video, FFRF. Reading your regular newsletter as a member gives me a lot of hope, and a lot of us need that right now. So, y'all go click the link below and become a member, too. They definitely deserve it. All right, so Everett found that not only would they ignore him when he talked about Jesus, but the Paha didn't have a creation story or a concept of God. They're just like me, for real. These things were not relevant to immediate experience and couldn't be empirically evidenced, so they weren't of any use."
"The Paha didn't ignore the spiritual realm entirely, though. They actually reported encountering spirits taking natural forms like that of a jaguar or a tree or a shape-shifting dolphin sometimes. But these were things they thought they had actually directly experienced. Now, maybe a little bit of a hot take here: I actually think that a claim of encountering a shape-shifting dolphin is less grandiose than a claim of encountering God, you know, the creator of the universe, the supreme being. Because if you encounter a dolphin, which you perceive to be shape-shifting, and describe it as such, I can at least believe that that is an experience that you can have, that you are capable of reporting. Right now, if you have an encounter with a burning bush or a disembodied voice or a a thing in a dream and you claim that that was God, the creator of the universe, the supreme being, how am I to believe you when the thing that you're reporting to have seen, God, has a nature which is like definitionally completely beyond your own understanding? So, yeah, I I'd be more likely to believe the shape-shifting dolphin thing."
Everett's inability to provide the level of evidence which the Paha needed to believe the gospel story sparked some doubts in Everett himself. But he still didn't give up trying to evangelize. He knew that people don't just accept Jesus because they believe he really died and really resurrected. They accept Jesus because they feel lost, they're lonely, depressed, they fear death, they want moral guidance, they want to see the world get better. Unfortunately for Everett's mission, the Paha were far from lost, broken, or immoral.
"I realize they don't have a word for worry. They don't have any concept of depression. And they treat people very well. If someone does have any sort of handicap, and the only ones I'm aware of are physical, they take very good care of them. When people get old, they feed them. I remember this one guy, he was too old to get around. He couldn't hunt. I said, uh, you know, does it bother you to give him food? I mean, he's not doing anything. And they said, uh, 'When I was a little boy, he put food in my mouth and took care of me. And now he's an old man, and I take care of him.' They didn't, they didn't store up food. They, they know how to smoke meat and they know how to salt meat, but they almost never do that. When they bring in meat, they give it away to everyone. And I said, 'Uh, don't you want to keep meat for tomorrow?' He said, 'I keep my meat in my in my brother's belly. Uh, that's where I keep what I have. Uh, I store it with my friends.'"
"In a big rainstorm in the Amazon, which is a pretty common occurrence, the Paha's flimsy little houses very often blow over at night at 3:00 in the morning, and everybody's soaking wet. And what is, what do you hear from them when this happens? Everybody's laughing. They think it's the funniest thing that ever happened. My house blew over. And so what do they do? They move into somebody else's house."
"In 2007, I took a, I took a team of people from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and they went down to do some experiments. And while we were there, one of them, who was actually my first PhD student and now a full professor at MIT, said, 'These seem like the happiest people I've ever seen in my life.' And I said, 'Yeah, well, how would you measure that?' I think they are, too, but when I tell people that, they say that's silly. So, how would you measure whether they're the happiest people or not? Well, as, as true psychologists, they said, uh, we measure the time they spend smiling and laughing, and we measure the time that other cultures spend smiling and laughing. And that's probably not a bad indication. They said, one, one, as one of them said, 'I haven't seen, I haven't looked at these people at any one time and not seen the majority of them looking happy.'"
"What are the lessons we can learn from the Paha? Well, for one thing, the Paha are happy without God. And that violates a lot of the predictions not only of religious uh uh uh uh folks, but of anthropologists who believe that God is an essential ingredient of all cultures. That's false. There are cultures that get by just fine without any concept of God."
Daniel Everett realized that the Paha didn't need his Christian message or his God. He said publicly that they're far from perfect, and that they would say as much themselves, but that they already possess all the virtues which Western religious people aspire to, but with none of the baggage of guilt or fear of hell.
By the mid-1980s, Everett's doubts culminated into an epistemological crisis, and he realized that he was an atheist. He lived for over a decade in frightened denial, concealing the truth from his family. A lot of us have been there. Once he finally confessed, his marriage fell apart, and two of his children cut off contact with him for a significant amount of time.
Everett has spoken quite strongly against colonialism, including his own actions, since the time of his mission. In 2009, he published his autobiography, *Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes*, in which he told this story. He's gone on to have a pretty incredible career as a linguist, in large part because of his experience in the Amazon. With all the influence the Paha had on him, I hope that along with his doubts, Everett also gained some of the happiness that the Paha clearly have in abundance.
Now, as novel as this story first appears, it's not just a one-off anecdote. It's a part of a much larger trend going back hundreds of years where the religious skepticism of indigenous people forces colonizers to re-examine their own religious ideas. It's no exaggeration to say that this trend was one of the principal forces behind the entire European Enlightenment.
In the 1680s and 90s, aristocrat Baron de La Hontan served in the French military in Canada. He claimed to have befriended many members of the Wendat tribe, also called the Huron, an Iroquoian-speaking people in what is now southern Ontario. There, La Hontan wrote a massively popular text about his adventures and dialogues with indigenous people. It was titled *New Voyages to North America*, was reprinted 11 times in its first 14 years, and translated widely. It's still considered one of the most influential texts of that century and is sometimes reprinted with the subtitle, "The Book That Started the French Enlightenment."
In this book, La Hontan recounts four debates he had with Adario, a character based on real-life Wendat thinker and diplomat Kondiaronk. Adario voices highly critical opinions about European morality, critiquing everything from its obsession with wealth to its legal system to its sexual politics. But their first debate in the book is entirely about Christianity, and it feels shockingly familiar, given that it's over 300 years old. We're going to look at some excerpts, but here's some important info before we do.
One, Adario is a fictional character, but according to scholars David Graeber and David Wengrow, there is good reason to believe La Hontan did actually have extensive dialogues with real-life Kondiaronk, with a notetaker potentially being present. So while this isn't an actual transcript of their conversation by any means, many of the points within it were probably made in real life.
Two, La Hontan was a bit of a skeptic himself, thanks in part to his relationship with the Wendat. So while he plays the role of Christian missionary in this dialogue, know that he's playing it up a bit for effect.
Three, Kondiaronk had been to Europe, knew French, and gained a great deal of experience speaking with Jesuit missionaries before this book was published. He was extremely well known as a brilliant orator and statesman both in the New World and the Old. And he was also known as a man impossible to convert to Christianity.
And finally, four, my source for this text is a 1735 English translation, but I am going to replace some of the older English words like "thee" and "thou" with modern English so it's easier to understand.
Okay, let's jump in.
La Hontan: "The Christian religion is a religion that men ought to profess in order to obtain a place in heaven. God has permitted the discovery of America, meaning to save all nations that will follow the laws of Christianity. Undeceive yourself, therefore, as to the imagined severity of Christianity, and embrace it without delay, regretting the loss of those days you've spent in ignorance, without a due sense of religion and worship, and without the knowledge of the true God."
Adario: "How do you mean without the knowledge of the true God? What are you mad? Do you believe we are void of religion after you've dwelt so long amongst us? Do you not know, in the first place, that we acknowledge a creator of the universe under the title of the Great Spirit or Master of Life, whom we believe to be in everything and to be unconfined to limits?"
Adario then spells out the ideas within Wendat spirituality, which includes the notion that tranquility of mind is preferable to the anxiety which comes from squabbling over unverifiable things concerning spirits or the afterlife.
Adario continues: "If your religion differs from ours, it does not follow that we have none at all. You know, I have been in France, New York, and Quebec, where I studied the customs and doctrines of the English and French. The Jesuits alleged that out of five or six hundred sorts of religions, there is only one that is the good and true religion, and that is their own, out of which no man will escape the flames of a fire that will burn his soul to all eternity. This is their allegation. But when they have said all, they cannot offer any proof for it."
For me, La Hontan's reasoning here reminds me of that of my own family, which has a missionary background. I was taught to just kind of assume everyone who wasn't Christian was only such because they were ignorant. That they hadn't really thought about spiritual stuff at all before. And once Christians come along and say their lines, people are just astonished to discover spirituality and then they convert to Christianity. This idea, of course, has less to do with convincing non-Christians and more to do with making Christians believe that they are justified in colonizing. After all, it's easy to stomach destroying a people's entire culture if you believe they never had much of a culture to begin with.
La Hontan: "They have a great deal of reason, Adario, to assert that there are bad souls. For without straggling far for a proof, they need only to give yours for an instance. He that is unacquainted with the truths of the Christian religion is not capable of receiving a proof. How many times have you heard that, atheists out there? Oh my God. All that you have offered in your own defense is prodigious madness. The country of souls, by that he means the Wendat afterlife that you speak of, is only a chimerical hunting ground. Whereas our holy scriptures inform us of a paradise seated above the remotest stars where God does actually reside, being encircled with glory, and the souls of all the faithful Christians. The same very scriptures make mention of a hell which we take to be situated in the center of the earth, and in which the souls of all such as reject Christianity, as well as those of bad Christians, will burn forever without consumption. This is a truth that you ought to think of."
Adario: "These holy scriptures that you and the Jesuits quote require that mighty faith which the good fathers are always teasing us with. This can be nothing but a persuasion. To believe means no more than to be persuaded of a thing. And to be persuaded or convinced is to see a thing with one's eyes or to have it recommended by clear and solid truths. Now, how can I have that faith since you can neither prove a tit of what you say, nor show it to me before my eyes? What grounds do you have for the destiny of the good souls who are with the Great Spirit above the stars, or the fate of the bad ones that shall burn forever in the center of the earth? You can do nothing but charge God with tyranny if you believe that he created even one single man with intent to render him eternally miserable amidst the flames in the center of the earth."
Okay, how many times have you heard this back and forth? All the way back in the 1680s, indigenous people of the Americas were saying what we secular people say to evangelical Christians today. Telling me about how I'll be rewarded for agreeing with you or punished for thinking for myself doesn't exactly make your religion sound more legitimate. And when that's what you bring up every time I repeatedly ask for evidence, I start thinking you just don't have any. I'm telling you, we've got to thank the indigenous people of the Americas for at least in part instigating the European intellectual tradition of doubting revealed truths and actually asking for evidence.
Okay, onto our last excerpt, which is my favorite. Here's the context: La Hontan has said that even though the Holy Scriptures have a hundred different authors, they were miraculously written without ever contradicting one another. He presents this as evidence of the truth of Christianity. Familiar, right?
Adario: "How do you mean without contradicting one another? Why, that book of holy things, is it not full of contradictions? These Gospels that the Jesuits speak of, don't they cause discord between the French and the English?"
At this time, the English were Protestant and the French were Roman Catholic. And yet, if we take your word for it, every period of that book sprung from the mouth of the Great Spirit. But if the Great Spirit meant that his words could be understood, why did he talk so confusedly and clothe his words in ambiguity? One or two things must follow from this. If he was born and died upon the earth and made speeches here, why then is his rationale lost? For he would certainly have spoken so distinctly and plainly that the very children might understand his meaning.
The English have told me that though their Gospels contain the same words with the French, yet there is as great a difference between their religion and yours as between night and day. They say positively that theirs is the best. And on the other hand, the Jesuits allege that the religion of the English and of a thousand nations besides is good for nothing. If there is but one true religion upon earth, who must I believe in this case? Who is it that does not take their own religion to be the most perfect? How can the capacity of man be able to single out that divine religion from amongst so many more that lay claim to the same title?
Believe me, my dear brother, the Great Spirit is wise. All his works are perfect. It's he that made us, and he knows perfectly well what will become of us. It's our part to act freely without perplexing our thoughts about future things. He made you to be born in France with the intent that you should believe what you neither see nor conceive. Me, he has caused to be born at Huron. To that end that I should give credit to nothing but what I understand and what my reason teaches me."
First of all, wow, that's a burn. But also, this is actually one of the main questions that prompted me to leave Christianity. If God's supposed words are so clear, why are there so many different interpretations of those words, all made by good people in good faith? Either God could not communicate more clearly and is therefore not all-knowing or all-powerful, or he intended to confuse us with his words and is therefore not all-good. Or maybe his supposed words are actually just the words of men, like everything else that's ever been written in history.
La Hontan starts to get pretty mad about halfway through this dialogue. Maybe because Adario patronizingly reassured him that it's okay for the French to be Christians and believe in things without evidence if they want. But Adario responds with a calm statement that I'm sure all of us have said to an overbearing proselytizer before.
La Hontan: "In earnest, if you do not yield to the uncontestable reasons that I produce for our mysteries, I will never speak to you as long as I live."
Adario: "My brother, do not trouble yourself. I do not intend to provoke you by offering my reasons. I do not hinder you from believing in the Gospels. I only beg the favor that you will allow me to doubt the truth of all the claims you have made."
Adario's whole point in arguing with La Hontan is not to destroy Christianity, then, but to defend the pluralistic space where they both can think freely. I love that.
After the success of this book, a slew of French philosophers went on to write their own imagined dialogues with an indigenous person of the Americas as a means of critiquing European society. In the process, they regularly misrepresented, oversimplified, and infantilized the people they used as literary props. However, many Enlightenment writers also openly stated that their novel ideas owed a debt to the real thoughts and traditions of Europe's newly colonized lands.
In their book, *The Dawn of Everything*, oh my god, read it right now. I've read it twice within the last two months. It's a very long book. Graeber and Wengrow emphasized the importance of the indigenous critique of Christianity in the development of Enlightenment thought. Questions like those posed by Adario forced philosophers to grapple with new doubts about the very nature of their society. These indigenous skeptics were, according to the writers, challenging the arrogance of received authority, that medieval certainty which maintained that the judgments of the church were necessarily superior to those of anyone else on earth.
These stories, to me, illustrate why pluralism and secular humanism naturally go together. Secular rationalism and concepts of religious freedom reemerged in Europe, which had been an authoritarian Christian backwater for centuries, only after Europeans encountered ideological challenges in other parts of the world.
Y'all probably already know I am not a fan of the New Atheist guys like Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins. And that is in part because I see them as having a colonizer mentality. They think they have the right way of thinking: atheistic liberalism. And so they support basically any means of propagating their ideology, even if it means destroying other cultures and the people of those cultures. This often means they align with the aims of evangelical Christian colonizers.
When Hitchens was alive, he was a huge supporter of the so-called War on Terror, citing the inferiority of others' religious ideas as justification. In this, he literally sided with the evangelical Christians of the Bush administration and acted like a Christian colonizer. Today, Sam Harris advocates for Israel's genocide in Gaza and in the West Bank, just as he supported the US War on Terror alongside Hitchens. This puts him in the same camp as Christian colonizers, too.
Dawkins' primary targets today seem to be trans people and indigenous communities. I have a whole video about his transphobia, so go check that out. There's literally a part of that video where he and his transphobic friend explicitly acknowledged that they side with persecuted evangelical Christians. But also, Dawkins has repeatedly spoken against any indigenous traditional knowledge, particularly that of the Māori, being included in science curricula. He's called its inclusion "self-righteous virtue signaling." All right, buddy. Who's in the [ __ ] Epstein files? This is despite the fact that Māori knowledge and indigenous knowledge more generally has increasingly important applications in ecology, natural resource management, and conservation.
In saying all of this, yes, Dawkins acts just like a Christian colonizer. When we insist that we have such an exclusive claim to truth that we deserve a privileged grasp on the reins of power, we become an oppositional force to human dignity, to free inquiry, and free expression. In seeking to so codify truth as we see it, we end up destroying the conditions in which truth can be discovered in the first place. I think it's time we humanists, skeptics, and freethinkers embrace the true foundation of our intellectual heritage: the litany of cultures in which dogma may be challenged because human dignity and diversity is first respected.
Thank you for watching. I've been Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic. I have been looking forward to writing and releasing this project for quite a while now. Uh, Eric could tell you as much. A special thanks to my patrons for their constant love and support. And praise be unto Our Lady, my top patron and the official savior of this channel. If you want to support my work, then subscribe. Also check out my second channel where I also make content. As always, if you are an apostate in need, there are resources linked in the description to help you find community and mental health support. Remember to be kind to others in the comments. And until next time, stay skeptical.