Tribe Converts Christian Man Back to Reality

Watch on YouTube · 2026-07-06 · 42 min

0:00 Hi, today I'm going to be talking about the story of a man who would have called himself a devout Christian. He went to the Amazon rainforest as a so-called missionary. These are people who try to spread the message of this book, which they call the Bible. They tell people that they will go to heaven if they start believing in Jesus. He met these people who were living somewhat naturally. They were already influenced by civilized people. The opposite of what he expected happened. He lost his Christian faith because of them. I will review some parts of a documentary about this story, and afterwards I will talk even more about it.

[video] 0:58 They call themselves the which means the straight one. And our language is a crooked head, a twisted head. Daniel Everett's mission was to bring Jesus to this remote tribe known as the Pidaha.

1:15 Too bad he forgot Jesus on the boat.

[video] 1:20 My main aim was to translate the Bible for a group of people who didn't have the Bible. Instead, the missionary found a group so content...

1:28 Wow, we need to go back. For a group of people who didn't have the Bible.

[video] 1:33 Instead, the missionary found a...

1:35 The facial development is insane. Her jaw is wider than the jaw of most modern men.

[video] 1:45 Groups so content in their world, they converted him.

1:50 And that's obviously because the whole face grew the way it should, just to be clear.

[video] 1:57 I've gone from a very fervent believer to an atheist. Even more remarkable is what he discovered about their communication.

[video] 2:09 According to Everett, Pidaha grammar breaks one of the fundamental rules of all human language. Half a world away, it sparked a bitter war of words. I had people sending me hate mail. There was a lot of viciousness in the attacks, real anger. It can't have anything to do with the nature of language.

2:30 Right. And most of that probably came from these loving Christians.

[video] 2:37 It just doesn't make any sense. I think he knows he's wrong. That's what I really think. I was appalled when I read that Chomsky had said that Dan was a charlatan. That is unacceptable. Now a professor of linguistics, Daniel Everett is on a new mission to put his controversial claim...

2:55 They are already wearing modern clothes. The government is probably already helping them in many ways. They call it help. I don't see it that way, obviously.

[video] 3:08 ...comes to the test. If he's right, the most cited academic of our time could well be wrong. And our understanding of human language may be changed forever.

[video] 3:24 In a remote corner of the Brazilian Amazon live the 400 remaining members of the Pidahar.

[video] 3:35 Life has changed little here in centuries. But something about the Pidahar has caught the world's attention.

[video] 3:46 It's how they communicate.

3:48 As I said, they are wearing modern clothes, they probably get some food from people who work for the so-called government, and who knows what else.

4:07 As you could see, they also have some dental issues which are unheard of. when it comes to natural people, people who do everything perfectly naturally.

4:37 And besides that, actual natural wild people would never let some strangers come and film them. We can see what happens when people try to go and visit the Sentinelese, for example.

5:21 I wonder why they didn't just try to run after the monkey for eight hours. Persistence hunting, right? No, they just walk and shoot arrows.

[video] 5:35 150 to 200 kilos of manioc meal, farinha, as it's known locally, for the pidaha each time I go in. 400 kilometers upriver, Professor Daniel Everett is preparing for his annual research trip to the pidaha. Everett has studied the tribe for 30 years, and what he claims to have found has made news around the globe.

[video] 5:58 There are just a narrow range of gifts that they want to receive. They want cloth, they want tools, they want maybe flashlights and batteries, fishhooks and line. Little things. They never ask for big things. They always ask for little things. And they always say, which means, I almost begin to want that.

6:24 That's simply because humans naturally don't actually need any of that stuff. It can be helpful, the tools, the fishhooks, but it's not going to make you happy directly.

[video] 6:39 We don't want others here.

[video] 6:52 But in the 1950s, the Pidaha were forced to open their world with their children dying of measles. Help arrived in the form of American missionaries.

7:06 Why do I believe that they twisted the story a little bit? If you understand what I mean.

[video] 7:14 Yes, I told you, I paid. I bought a bicycle.

[video] 7:22 There are no permanent buildings, no cultivation, and they rely almost entirely on nature to meet their needs.

[video] 7:41 Today, the professor is one of only three outsiders who can speak Pidaha, the others being his former wife and the missionary he replaced. I said that for the price of coffee, we just want to keep one child.

[video] 8:05 They said, well, there are a lot more upriver. Take one of those.

[video] 8:15 Everett and his family lived intermittently here for more than 30 years. This is all that's left of my house, just a few support posts here and there. I raised my children here for several years. I lived here for eight years. I had a large, Pinaha-style house.

[video] 8:34 My wife almost died here. My daughter almost died here. I had malaria many times here. Our lives were threatened by the pitahas here on at least three separate occasions. They threatened to kill us all, and I had to sit up all night out in front.

8:46 Hmm, that's interesting. Not surprising.

[video] 8:51 The word for ear is aue, and the word for skin is aue, and the word for foreigner is aue, and the word for hand is aue, and the word for Brazil nutshell is aue. and that's only distinguished by the Tomans, all of those.

[video] 9:08 As his fluency grew, Everett began to realize something was missing. The Pidaha have no words for colors, no past or future tense, and incredibly, the Pidaha have no numbers.

9:26 And why should they have words for numbers? Why? In nature, do you need that? Of course not. And do you need words for colors? You could maybe say that there could be some scenarios where It could be somewhat useful, but it would be very rare. Overall, you could also say that it's useless to learn that.

9:59 And the past tense is obviously useless anyway.

[video] 10:11 Research from MIT indicates that Pidaha may be the only culture on Earth without numeracy. the Pitaha don't have numbers because they don't need them. They survive just fine without them. Somebody asked me once, you mean Pitaha mothers don't know how many children they have? Well, that's exactly what I mean. They don't know how many children they have, but they know all of their children's names and they know all of their children's faces. They don't need to know how many children they have to know who their children are and how they feel about them.

[video] 10:42 Years of hunting with these people led Everett to another discovery.

[video] 10:51 Pidaha have an encyclopedic knowledge of their world. Every Pidaha child, woman, and man in the entire culture knows the name of every single species of flora and fauna in their environment.

[video] 11:05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, water.

[video] 11:12 No, here, here, watch the air. the thousands of different species that they encounter, they not only can give you the name of, they can describe in detail, they can tell you what they eat, they can tell you how they live, they can tell you where they're found. There it goes, there it goes. There it goes.

[video] 11:52 As Everett immersed himself in their world, he had a profound realization. The Pidaha appear to live entirely

12:07 And that is what I always say. Humans naturally don't think about the so-called past, because those are just memories that doesn't influence your life right now. And they would obviously not think about the future, because it's just your imagination, it doesn't exist. It's useless to worry about something, to think about what you will do, because you can have everything that you want right now. It's very easy to do it. You just need to do it. But people nowadays are afraid to do it. Right, exactly. You, of course, won't have the fish in front of you in that moment, so to speak, but if you go out to fish, then you are already doing

13:04 what is required for you to actually acquire the fish.

[video] 13:08 ...be dictated by their needs of the moment rather than by their worries of the future or their knowledge of the past. They live in the present.

13:23 And the past is not your knowledge. Your knowledge can only be what you know, what you sense. Your so-called past would only be memories.

[video] 13:41 For many, the pursuit of happiness means living free of regret and future worry.

13:48 All right, exactly, naturally. It's not as if they learned to live that way. It's just how you live.

[video] 13:56 It's something that Peter He seemed to have mastered.

[video] 14:08 When I'm around these people and I'm by myself with them and I talk to them, they're just so relaxed and so laid back and so hard to agitate and get excited or get worried. They just have so much to teach us about taking each day one day at a time.

14:27 It's interesting how they have a wild pig as a pet, I assume. It's the same as what you see around you nowadays. People choose some animals as so-called pets, as their friends, and the other ones they kill and eat.

[video] 14:56 The contentment Everett witnessed affected him profoundly. He began to question his own deep beliefs. The dilemma for the Christian missionary is for your message to work, you have to convince them that they're wrong. So they have to be lost before you can convince them that they need to be.

15:15 Exactly, and that's what I always say. You have to feel lost, depressed, miserable to actually look for religions, which don't even exist. You just... absorb these ideas from these books which were written by other people, meaning that you absorb the ideas of other people and as a missionary you go and spread their ideas, not your own ideas. Those were never your own ideas. Be saved.

[video] 16:00 I eventually realized that the Pitahas are happy already. They don't believe in hell. They don't believe in heaven. So taking the message of God to the Pitahas is like taking ice to the Eskimos.

[video] 16:17 We don't know him. The Christians and all of the other so-called religious people also don't know him, seeing as he doesn't exist, but they believe in him.

16:42 And in nature, there's nothing at all that indicates a god, obviously. And that's why there's no recorded cases of humans in nature actually believing in a god. They don't have any so-called spiritual beliefs. When you actually deeply research this topic, then you will find out that that's how it is.

17:14 Some people did worship the sun, you could say. Maybe I wouldn't call it worshipping exactly, but it's all right to call it that. But the sun is present in this reality. It's the highest so-called power. Obviously, if anything, then you would... worship the sun. That's normal, because you don't need to believe in it. It's right there.

17:52 Not a single one, but if he would go to the cities in Brazil where people are depressed and lost because they don't live naturally, then he would find lots of people. Because when you're lost, then you want to attach yourself to something. And if somebody tells you that you will go to heaven eventually, where everything will be fine, then of course you start believing that. But I just need to really be clear about this. For them, life is already fine. It's more than fine. That's why they don't need this belief that they will eventually go to heaven if life is already heaven on earth.

[video] 18:42 The questioning of my own faith began as I saw how happy the Piraha were, as I tried to answer their very probing and direct questions about the nature of the evidence that I had for what I believed. And as I reflected on all of these things, it eventually led to the abandonment of my own faith.

[video] 19:00 This dramatic change triggered the breakup of Everett's family.

19:05 What kind of a family is that? Is that love?

[video] 19:08 ...experience to have a relationship of over 30 years come to an end like that. I mean, we got married when we were 18, but much more difficult to me was the fact that my children didn't speak to me for two years.

19:22 And even today... Probably because the mother told them not to speak to him. Because children naturally wouldn't stop speaking to the father because of some ideas, religious beliefs. No way.

[video] 19:37 They struggle with some things based on how radically I've diverged from the father that they thought I was in terms of my beliefs.

[video] 19:49 Thank you.

[video] 19:53 Abandoning missionary life, Everett began to focus on his academic career. He had long suspected something was fundamentally different about Pidaha grammar. And if his hunch was right, it could transform our understanding of human language.

[video] 20:18 At the time that I was going through the spiritual crisis and the family crisis and the marriage crisis, I was also going through an intellectual crisis. And I had to say something about this at the same time that I tried to explain a number of the unique characteristics of the Piraha language.

[video] 20:35 I had no idea when I started writing this paper that it was going to be controversial to the degree that it was. Daniel Everett had just picked a fight with the father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky. Noam is not only the most influential linguist in this sense of the past century, but I think it's probably the case that he's the most influential linguist of all time. I finished the paper, I sent it off to the number one journal of anthropology, and then all hell broke loose.

[video] 21:03 It's funny how they even care about languages. They get so emotionally attached to ideas. Languages are just ideas. You hear sounds, you learn what they are supposed to mean,

21:30 The same goes for the symbols that you see in books. And then you essentially just imagine that somebody is saying something or that you are reading something. In reality, when you actually look at it the way it is, then it's just sounds and symbols. But people use their imagination to interpret it as languages. It's just crazy to actually get emotional over something like that, some abstract ideas.

[video] 22:09 I had people sending me hate mail, accusing me of racist views. And I think it's a move that many, many intellectuals make to get a little bit of attention. I was appalled when I read that Chomsky had said that Dan was a charlatan. I know both these people, and that is not right. That is unacceptable. The reason there was so much fuss is really not very scientific. I mean, it was, here's this guy coming out of the jungle with this language that only he knows, and he's saying that the greatest linguist in history is dead wrong about his most important idea. There's also questions about whether any of it's true, but that's another story.

22:45 Exactly, it's just ideas. It really doesn't matter. It doesn't affect this reality, it's all in your mind.

[video] 22:55 the ability to combine an endless number of ideas in a single sentence. So let's say that we have a simple sentence like, Bill saw Mary. And now we want to make that part of a larger sentence. John said that Bill saw Mary. But for this to be recursion, we have to be able to keep going. So we might want to say something like, John said that Bill said that Mary said that Peter said that Irving bought a house. And that is real, that is true recursion, the ability for a sentence to just keep going on forever. If in a language you can show there is a larger sentence and you can't make it any larger, that language doesn't have recursion. And Pidaha is such a language. In 2002, Noam Chomsky proposed that recursion is the basis of all human language, a key component of his theory of universal grammar, the most influential idea in linguistics. Universal grammar argues the structure of language, the grammar, is innately found in the human genome, something we are born with rather than learn.

[video] 23:50 According to the theory, all human languages, regardless of their surface differences, share a common deep structure, a universal grammar. It's a powerful idea, and it's dominated linguistics for more than 50 years.

24:04 All of these so-called modern languages were influenced by religions, though. That needs to be understood. How could you tell somebody that there used to be a guy called Jesus if they don't even talk about the so-called past? But if you see the past as something real, which most people do today, they even talk about historical facts That's an absolute oxymoron, obviously, but people nowadays actually see ideas and stories as a reality, which is insane. Truly, it is.

[video] 24:45 In the modern sense, universal grammar is just the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty. That it exists is hard to deny.

24:58 It obviously doesn't exist.

[video] 25:02 This preoccupation, he claims, produces a grammar with only a present tense. A grammar without recursion. A grammar of happiness.

[video] 25:34 That's what I always say. Men and women don't fight in nature. Why would they? There are no problems.

25:52 Nowadays, people imagine that there's a lot of problems, but if a man wants to hunt, why would the woman say, no, don't go hunt, don't go and do that. She also wants food. So there's never actual problems between men and women or anybody because they live naturally. They just do what they want to do. Meaning that there's always harmony.

[video] 26:22 I don't know what I'm doing.

[video] 26:26 I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing.

26:59 They are crazy good at aiming. Not surprising.

[video] 27:04 Our film crew is returning to the Pidaha. Besides delivering Ebert's message, we have also been asked to collect more recordings.

[video] 27:13 But when we arrive, what we find is totally unexpected. Since visiting two years ago, the Pidaha village of Pikya has been transformed.

[video] 27:29 The Brazilian government has built a health clinic, toilets and permanent houses here.

[video] 27:35 This remote corner of the Amazon even has a...

27:38 I can already imagine what they give them in the health clinic. ...electricity.

[video] 27:56 But perhaps most significant is the presence of a school. Pidaha children are learning Portuguese and how to count.

28:05 Yeah. And then they will go to the cities and work and study there.

28:16 Then their children will grow up there. They will start eating rain sludge and, uh, They will experience the same problems as everybody else nowadays. Their facial development is insane. It's natural, but when you compare it to most people today, they look better than 99% of the models that we have.

[video] 28:43 The positive part is the negative part. I think the positive part is that they have more energy,

28:57 I assume that their diet used to be so-called diet. I guess David just said animals. You can't really call it a diet. Over 90% animals, maybe sometimes 100%. What else could they find there? Some fruits, I assume.

[video] 29:16 They sit and watch TV now. Oh man, man, man.

29:46 And soon they will be sitting there with glasses and they will need braces because of all the modern food.

[video] 29:53 For many outsiders, such change poses a dilemma. On one hand, it empowers the Pitaha. On the other, their unique culture may be lost. And the Pitaha, I want them to be healthy and happy, what I would want for any group of people.

[video] 30:14 This is how we do it. This is how we do it. This is how we do it. This is how we do it. This is how we do it.

30:34 Now we will look at the segment from one of his speeches.

[video] 30:38 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?

30:50 Right, that means that they use their senses and they only accept something as evidence if it actually exists in this reality, which is what all humans naturally do. But so-called modern humans also accept some symbols and sounds from other people as evidence. And when you do that, it's very easy to manipulate you, because that's all hearsay. you don't actually know if what you are being told by somebody else is true. It's just an idea. So if I say, did John go fishing?

[video] 31:33 They can say, John went fishing, he-I, which means I heard that he did. Or they can say, John went fishing, si-be-ga, and that means I deduced that he did. Or they can say, John went fishing, ha, and that means I saw it, he went.

31:48 In some respects, they're the ultimate empiricists. Exactly. They rely on empirical evidence. They are actual scientists, you could say. And that's what all scientists should do. But nowadays, they rely on hearsay, stories, ideas, beliefs. which are mainly religious beliefs. And that is the opposite of science.

[video] 32:13 Because the Pirahas had no word for God, I used the term Maihi Hiyoya, which means high up father. I said that our high up father had made my life better. He had come into my heart and made me happy. Ko'oi asked me once, what else does your God do? I told him, well, he made the stars and he made the earth. Then I asked, what do the Pirahas say? He answered, Well, the Pirahas say that these things were not made. So I would go further and ask questions like, Who made the Micey River? Where did the Pirahas come from? But I soon began to realize that they had no creation myth or traditional story. The Pirahas don't talk about the distant future or the distant past. They don't talk about unexperienced events or fiction.

33:02 Exactly. That's what I always say. Why would you talk about something that you didn't experience? Then you are talking about beliefs and ideas. That's why humans and nature don't do that. It's not relevant.

[video] 33:23 They live only for the present.

33:26 Exactly, and that's because they do what they want to do in the present. Humans nowadays believe that they are not allowed to do that, and that's why they live in their own fantasy world. That's why they think about the so-called past so much, They imagine how the earth was created. They imagine some kind of God in the clouds or who knows where. And that's why they think about the future so much. There's no need for that, naturally, when you're happy. But people aren't happy nowadays.

[video] 34:06 One night I decided to tell them something very personal about myself. That my stepmother committed st and that this had led me to Jesus. The Pirahas burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. Why are you laughing? I asked. She c**ed herself. Ha ha ha! How stupid! Pirahas don't c themselves, they answered. They were utterly unimpressed. The fact that someone I'd loved had committed s*** was no reason at all for the Pirahas to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect. The Pirahas man then asked, Hey, Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us, or light like you? Well, I said, I've never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago, but I do have his words. Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him? They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy, they weren't interested in any stories about him.

[video] 35:03 This is because the Pirahas believe only what they see. What a setback for my missionary objectives. It made me think long.

35:12 And it's not as if they believe what they see. They know what they see because that's knowledge.

[video] 35:19 You want us to live like Americans, but the Pirhas do not want to live like Americans. We like to drink. We like more than one woman.

35:29 We like more than one woman. He also likes more than one woman, but he imagined that he married somebody and that's why all of a sudden he didn't like other women. In reality, he did, but he tried to suppress

[video] 35:51 his desires but we like you you can stay with us but we don't want to hear any more about jesus okay the other men present seemed to agree with him so i replied if you don't want jesus you don't want us i then explained i needed to get on with my studying so the men rose and left to go fishing this shocked me and this information presented me with a clear moral choice I had gone to the Pirahas to tell them about Jesus and to give them an opportunity to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell. I talked this over with my wife, Karen. We decided that before we made any decision, we would take our first trip back to the United States in over five years, and I thought hard about the challenge of my missionary work. I was trying to convince a happy, satisfied people that they were lost and needed Jesus as their personal Savior. On our return, we decided to move to another village.

[video] 36:51 And that will never work, obviously. We had something new to offer this group of Pirahas, the recently translated Gospel of Mark in Piraha, recorded in my own voice. I brought in a wind-up tape recorder and taught the Pirahas how to use it. A few weeks later, the people were still listening to the Gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again. It was becoming clear that the message I had staked my life and career on did not fit the Piraha's culture.

[video] 37:39 They didn't feel lost.

37:41 They didn't imagine some kind of culture. The problem is that he came from a place where people imagined this culture and all of these rules. And then he met people who lived... somewhat naturally. And of course, they didn't care about any of that. And what they did care about was not what you expected because they based their lives on something completely else, not some ideas. They based their life on this actual reality.

[video] 38:17 Didn't feel a need to be saved either. They are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. Surprisingly, all this resonated with me. The Pirahas' rejection of the Gospel caused me to question my own faith. There was so much about the Pirahas that I admired—their quality of inner life, their happiness, their contentment. The Pirahas have built their culture around what is useful to their survival. My faith seemed a glaring irrelevancy in this culture. It was superstition to the Pirahas.

38:51 and it began to seem more and more like superstition to me i began seriously to question the nature of faith of believing in something unright christians walk around with this attitude as if they have it all figured out and they know the right way and then they meet people who actually live naturally or somewhat naturally And then they realize that nature is the only way.

[video] 39:23 Insane. Sometime in the late 1980s, I came to admit to myself that I no longer believed in any article of faith or in anything supernatural. I was a closet atheist. I was not proud of it, and I feared the consequences. It took 20 years for me to reach the place where I was finally prepared to take the consequences of my deconversion. And as I expected, when I finally announced my change of belief, it had severe consequences for me personally. It's such a difficult decision for anyone to tell his closest friends and family that he no longer shares their foundational beliefs.

40:04 In the end, my loss of religion and the... And that shouldn't even matter whatsoever if you have true friends and a real family. Do you think that any of them would care if somebody believes something? They don't believe... anything anyway, when it comes to what they base their life on, but, uh, They would for sure not say that I'm not going to be friends with you anymore. And they would not abandon their father just because he believes something. That's not even relevant in this reality. It's just ideas. And if you attach yourself to ideas, then you are brainwashed because you are trying to attach yourself to something that's not even found in this reality. That's how you can understand that they have messed with your mind.

[video] 41:01 crisis that accompanied it led to the breakup of my family the one thing I had most wanted to avoid I went to the pier house when I was 26 years old now I'm old enough to receive senior discounts I gave them my youth I Now my grandchildren all know the pirahas, and my children are who they are in part because of them. The pirahas have shown me that there's dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell, and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile. And they've shown me that for years I held many of my beliefs without warrant.

[video] 41:55 I've learned these things from the Pirahas, and I will be grateful to them as long as I live.

42:12 The most important message to take away from all of this is that you should not base your life on ideas and beliefs. You can believe something, but It should not have any influence at all on the purpose of your life, your desires, and what you actually want to do. All of that should be based on your senses, which is what knowledge is. But most people nowadays do base their lives on ideas and beliefs, and that is a guaranteed path to misery. Thanks for watching.