The Man Who Lost His Religion To The Amazonian Pirahã Tribe

Everett with a Paraha tribesman

Many people don't understand what life would be like without religion. Those who do not subscribe to religion are often perceived as 'missing out,' or living an 'empty life.'

Most people cannot imagine what life without religion would be like simply because they have always had religion, or have always had religion around them. Their parents had religion, their grandparents had religion, and so on.

Daniel Everett was a Christian missionary and evangelist whose expertise in language led him on a mission trip where he lived among the Pirahã, a tribe of Amazon natives.

Everett's experience with the Pirahã eventually led to his rejection of Christianity, and religion in general.

Here is a wonderful clip of Everett speaking about the Pirahã, who, due to their isolation, never developed religious beliefs. This story of the Pirahã dovetails nicely with a recent University of Texas study which concluded that our brains are not predisposed to supernatural concepts. Theses concepts are gained through exposure.



Read more about Everett in the New Yorker and at The Age.

Letter Resurfaces, Sheds Light on Lincoln's Faith

A newly resurfaced letter written by Abraham Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, recently went up for sale.  The 3-page letter, priced at $35,000, addressed to Edward McPherson, Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, appears to be an attempt to set the record straight on Lincoln's faith, after a series of biographies following his death.  The letter is signed Feb. 4, 1866, a year after Lincoln's assassination.

Herndon wrote:
"Mr. Lincoln's religion is too well known to me to allow of even a shadow of a doubt; he is or was a Theist & a Rationalist, denying all extraordinary -- supernatural inspiration or revelation."

"At one time in his life, to say the least, he was an elevated Pantheist, doubting the immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term.  I love Mr. Lincoln dearly, almost worship him, but that can't blind me. He's the purest politician I ever saw, and the justest man."

The letter isn't exactly scandalous, or jaw-dropping, in any sense.  It does, however, shed more light on the complex, and evolving, religious beliefs of one of America's most important figures.  And in a climate in which we debate the nature of religion as it relates to our nation's history, it reminds us that religious diversity and skepticism are as hardly recent developments, and are as American as traditional Christianity.