re: #47 BlueGrl21

I once had a guy offer to faith heal my limp. In the middle of a Trader Joe’swait no it was Fresh Market. I deferred and he said “I have a pretty good success rate.” and persisted in wanting to pray for me, and it became very clear that it wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about God. It was about his feeling of connection to the divine being an ego-enhancer, his mark of specialness. Like Simon Magus.

…and that’s what I see in stories like this.

Yeah, it can’t be emphasized enough that this was an act of hubris which treat the idea of witnessing like some kind of “I can do it more extreme” stunt. The American missionaries I’ve met in India treat the locals like spiritual real estate rather than people, and in turn the shallow Christianity they communicate to converts is about superiority of true belief and the entitlement to talk shit about the surrounding false believers.

The Sentinelese have never, ever interacted with anyone in any way but driving them away or killing them. People that study isolated tribes professionally have failed, and most of the data we have on them is approximations based on other Andaman peoples. Their language is an isolate that no one has any records of, let alone a lexicon that could facilitate a dialogue. There’s a record of every time someone in the 20th/21st century has even attempted contact, and they don’t even take gifts left on the shore.

This was never going to work.