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.