Apparently Everett has been speaking out for at least several months now but I only learned about him today thanks to a rather brief post at Inquisitr.com.

Here’s a more detailed version of his eye-opening story:

—– How An Amazonian Tribe Turned A Missionary Into An Atheist (Barry Duke/The Freethinker; Nov 8, 2008)

A riveting and hugely satisfying report on BBC Radio 4 today tells the story of a missionary who was charged by an American missionary group with taking the Gospel to the little understood Pirahas tribe in the Amazon – only to realise how ridiculous his faith in Christianity was.

Daniel Everett, 57, a linguist in the Departmental Chair of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University, told presenter John McCarthy on the Excess Baggage programme, that he had travelled to the Amazon in the 70s to bring the tribe “the joy of faith” only to discover that they were a deeply contented people. In fact they seemed far better contented than he was.

Tribe members asked the missionary whether he had seen or experienced any of the things he was telling them about. He had to admit that he hadn’t; that he was simply passing things onto them that were told to him by people who hadn’t seen or experienced them either.

The Pirahas, he said, “believed that the world was as it had always been, and that there was no supreme deity”. Furthermore they had no creation myths in their culture. In short, here was a people who were more than happy to live their lives “without God, religion or any political authority”.

Despite Everett translating the Book of Luke into Piraha and reading it to tribe members, the Pirahas sensibly resisted all his attempts to convert them.

According to a report in the New Yorker: “His zeal soon dissipated…. Convinced that the Piraha assigned no spiritual meaning to the Bible, Everett finally admitted that he did not, either. He declared himself an atheist….”

According to Wikipedia, Everett “was having serious doubts by 1982, and had lost all faith by 1985 after having spent a year at MIT. He would not tell anyone about his atheism for another 19 years; when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact.”

Everetts account of his life among the Pirahas is told in his book Don’t Sleep There are Snakes. BBC Radio 4 has chosen it as its Book of The Week, and it will be broadcast from Monday, November 17, 2008….

The book concludes with Everett saying: “The Pirahas have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comforts of heaven or the fear of hell, and of sailing towards the great abyss with a smile. And they have shown me that for years I held many of my beliefs without warrant. I have learned these things from the Pirahas, and I will be grateful to them for as long as I live.”…

The New Yorker story (from April, 2007) includes these additional passages:

On October 4, 1968, at the age of seventeen, he became a born-again Christian. “I felt that my life had changed completely, that I had stepped from darkness into light – all the expressions you hear.” He stopped using drugs, and when he and Keren were eighteen they married. A year later, the first of their three children was born, and they began preparing to become missionaries. In 1976, after graduating with a degree in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, Everett enrolled with Keren in the Summer Institute of Linguistics, known as S.I.L., an international evangelical organization that seeks to spread Gods Word by translating the Bible into the languages of preliterate societies. They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren stayed in a hut in the jungle with the couple’s children – by this time, there were three – while Everett underwent gruelling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for several days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete, and a flashlight….

“As I read more and I got into philosophy and met a lot of friends who werent Christians, it became difficult for me to sustain the belief structure in the supernatural,” he said….

He threw himself into missionary work, translating the Book of Luke into Pirah and reading it to tribe members. His zeal soon dissipated, however. Convinced that the Pirah assigned no spiritual meaning to the Bible, Everett finally admitted that he did not, either. He declared himself an atheist, and spent his time tending house and studying linguistics….

To Everett, the Pirahs unswerving dedication to empirical reality – he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle” – explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirah had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?”…

A story by Patrick Barkham that appeared in the Nov 10, 2008 edition of The Guardian added these details:

Soon after he first arrived in the Amazon, Everett was nearly killed when the Pirah discovered he was ordering passing river traders not to give them whisky. The Pirah were rarely violent, but intensely rejected any kind of coercion. Crucially, Everett came to see his religion as fundamentally coercive. His academic studies were ultimately designed to help him translate the Bible into Pirah. When they heard the word of God, his evangelic mission believed, they would be converted. Everett translated the Book of Luke, read it to the Pirah and they were utterly unmoved. By 1985, he had privately lost his faith. “It’s wrong to try and convert tribal societies,” he says. “What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don’t see that evidence very often. So then I find myself with the Pirah. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I’m saying it ought to be lived, they just don’t fear heaven and hell.”

His wife, Keren, and three children were all “committed” Christians. Extraordinarily, Everett couldn’t tell them of his loss of faith until the late 90s. “I kept hoping that I might get my faith back,” he says. He likens telling his wife to coming out as gay. “I said, ‘I just can’t do this any more, I can’t pretend, I don’t believe this stuff.’ So she immediately called the kids to tell them. It was just such utter shock and revulsion.” Did they feel betrayed? “Yes, they felt betrayed. My youngest daughter said, ‘Were you a hypocrite the whole time you were raising us? Did you teach us to believe one way, which you never believed?’ I did believe. I had a genuine, sincere conversion experience. I was quite a successful evangelist. I’ve had people write to me and say, ‘Gee, I’m a Christian because of you and I hear you’re not a Christian, that’s shocking to me.’ I don’t take these things lightly but that’s who I am. I can’t change it.”

Murder is rare among the Pirah. The only punishment they regularly practice is ostracising members of their society. It seems a bitter irony that Everett’s loss of faith caused his ostracism not from the Pirah, but from his own family. His marriage broke up. “After a couple of months I tried to get us back together and she said, ‘Only when you come back to religion will I even consider it’, and I said, ‘Well, then it’s over.’” Two of his grown-up children, Shannon, a missionary like her mother, and Caleb, an anthropologist like his father, cut off all contact. Three weeks ago, after the death of a close friend, they got back in touch for the first time in years. “Now they are coming around.” An almost imperceptible tremor registers in Everett’s voice. “Maybe I’m coming around. We’re approaching one another and realising the most important thing is love.”

Everett, who has remarried, has not visited the Pirah since January 2007. It has been his longest period apart from them. Occasionally, his ex-wife, who is still pursuing her missionary work on the banks of the Maici, will put them on the satellite phone. “I know they are not understanding why I haven’t been there,” he says. But it is difficult to return with his ex-wife there. “There will always be tension,” he says. “She believes that if the Pirahs reject the gospel it’s because it hasn’t been communicated clearly. I believe it has been communicated clearly and they reject it because it’s utterly irrelevant.” It’s almost tragic: Keren’s beliefs impugn Everett’s competence; Everett’s findings attack her entire belief system.

All of which provides us with more evidence for the following conclusions:

—– Not all societies have creation myths.

—– It’s possible for individuals and societies to be quite happy and moral without gOd or religion.

—– Evidence, logic, and life experience CAN prompt even Christian missionaries to become atheists.

—– Despite the many attempts to present Christianity and “family values” as being virtually synonymous, Christianity is quite capable of inspiring intolerance, turning relatives against each other, and breaking up families.

For other examples of theists who have had their minds changed by evidence and logic, see the entries I posted on April 1, 2003; July 23, 2007; and Nov 17, 2007.

The 70 Atheist Stories that readers have shared with me over the years also remain well worth reading! And it’s *never* too late to share yours, too. :-)