I guess it's always sad when people die....

[conuly]

but there is a reason North Sentinel Island is off-limits. “I have been so nice to them. Why are they so angry and so aggressive?” I don't know, maybe because you were trespassing? They've made it abundantly clear that they don't want visitors.

According to The Washington Post, he did at least get to holler at them (his words, not mine) that Jesus loves them, so I guess his trip wasn't a total waste. (He presumably yelled at them in English. He certainly could not have been speaking their language, because none of us knows what that sounds like.)

With any luck, he didn't get a chance to pass any novel pathogens to these people and the deaths will stop with him.

Edit: Friends are calling him a martyr. I'm not going to say what I think, out of respect for his grieving family, but he's not a damn martyr. He didn't even have a freaking plan.

Comments

[siderea]

Oooh, what useful vocabulary! Gratias tibi ago!

[konsectatrix]

I spent a few years on team evangelical. I think a lot of the problem with dealing with the broad Dominionist streak in American behavior and politics is that outsiders simply do not get their logic, or how the belief system evolved to spread without any regard to... anything else, and also to stop other people from getting through to current practioners and their deliberately destructive colonist crap. It's the flu virus of Christianity. Given the strong authoritarian flavor, it plays with fascism really well too. /tldr

:) Benigne dici'!

[siderea]

politics is that outsiders simply do not get their logic

You're not the first person I've heard to say that in regard to this case, and I've got to tell you: everything people who have come out of that culture are now insisting about it is stuff I seem to recall Sam Harris (or one of the other Four Horsemen of Atheism) saying. "Hey guys? Guys? They really believe this stuff."

[konsectatrix]

Yeah, multiple people have come out and written books on the subject (I vaguely remember one coming out nearly 15 years ago or so?), so it's that much more frustrating that I still don't see much sign that anyone else is actually listening (at a political and journalistic level at least).

I wasn't saying that people don't get them as an excuse for the inexcusable, but in the sense of, no, some of this crap can be avoided and pushed back against, and SHOULD be; you can anticipate and even successfully argue against this destructive behavior, if their language and their logic is turned back at them, on their level.

THAT works; threats of punishment, arguments using progressive terms/jargon, appeals to reason and empathy etc, calling people stupid and delusional, etc. will not. My feelings about the issue would use language like that, because I'm pissed off and sad about it. The reasoning part that actually would like to make this stop knows better.

I was talking about this culture 20 years ago, and saying that it was a problem to anyone that was interested and would listen. My tune has never, ever changed, wrt that. I'm just not internet famous, I have a life besides my evangelical past, and I never bothered to write a book about it. This ain't the first horrifyingly destructive faith stunt a Dominionist Evangelical has pulled, and it's far from the last.