I just finished a book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, which was suggested to me by Nathan, who read an article about it and thought it would be right up my alley. It’s the memoir of a Christian missionary and linguist who spent many years among a tribe in the Amazon called the Pirahã, studying their unusual language and trying to teach them about Jesus. They ended up inspiring him to become an atheist, but the book doesn’t really focus on that fact.
It’s largely about the language, and the culture that influences it. The Pirahã have no words for numbers or colors, and the author and his family failed to teach them how to count to ten in Portuguese in eight months of instruction. There are other absurdities about the language which undermine Noam Chomsky’s theories about linguistics. The second half of the book goes on about this a bit much, but it was interesting nonetheless.
While only a small portion of the book is dedicated to the discussion of religion, the final sentence of the book suggests that what he observed about the lack of religion among the Pirahã may be the most important thing he learned from them over the decades spent among the tribe. I neglected to write it down, but it goes something like, “The Pirahã are happier and more stable than any Christian or other religious person that i have ever known.” What little Everett does say about religion and the objectives of missionaries is eye-opening, and terribly interesting.
I also finished The End of Faith by Sam Harris this month. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Dawkins’s The God Delusion. It made its own good points, but i felt that the discussion of “spirituality” (which is really an allusion to extreme concentration achieved through meditation and altered states of perception from drugs, but nothing having to do with a metaphysical spirit) was rather irrelevant and confusing. I think Harris should have left that for another book on so-called atheist spirituality. I’m trying to read such a book right now, and it seems so far to just be a defense of certain aspects of religion.
I’m also reading God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I was hesitant to pick it up, since Hitchens seems rather arrogant in the videos i’ve checked out on YouTube, but i figured i’ve read two books by the so-called Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse, so i might as well keep going. The book is well written and illustrates with jaw-dropping fact after fact how religion really does poison everything. (And that’s the subtitle, not my own assertion. Though i’m beginning to agree whole-heartedly.) And we’re talking present-day stuff, not just the Crusades and Inquisition and all that.
Friday, May 29th, 2009 11:50 am • reading, religion
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June 1st, 2009 at 12:12 am
Soooo, um………, what’s with all these religious readings? I’ve (obviously) not read anywhere near this amount of readings on the subject, but, I’m curious as to why you have and what you’ve come up with…..?