[size=16pt]FROM MISSIONARY TO ATHEIST[/size]

‎"I said, “Oh, there’s a great expression for me to translate.” I built up gradually the ability to translate parts of the bible, and I read to them my translation of part of the Gospel of John one night, and I gave them my testimony. And as you know — anybody who’s got the remotest connection with the Christian church — giving a testimony is supposed to be a powerful thing. You talk about how once I was blind and now I see, how I went from this very bad background to this very good person that I am today.

So I gave them my testimony and I told them about my stepmother committing suicide. When I got done telling them, they all burst out laughing, and I said, “What are you laughing about?” I was really hurt. “Why are you laughing?” They said, “We don’t kill ourselves. You people kill yourselves? What is this?”

We learn that not all the things we thought were universal are universal, not all the things that make people happy are necessary to make people happy, and that the idea that somebody died on a cross 2,000 years ago that nobody ever saw, nobody knows anybody who ever saw, has any relevance to my happiness or my life in any way today.

As I began to think back on it, and reflect at night of all the people I had met, it occurred to me that the most important lessons in my life were from meeting people who were not like me, whether they were Brazilian intellectuals, or people from other religions, or people who had no religion, or people of other races and ethnicities. These were the lessons that had most affected me.

We live in guilt and Christianity takes away our guilt. We have been made lost by religion, in many respects. Finding salvation has become the task of so many Americans because they’ve been told that they’re lost in one form or another by this guilt and the oppression of religion.

That’s why David Livingstone, when he went to Africa as a missionary, said that the first step of missions is to destroy the local culture. Destroy it through capitalism, because as you create a desire for Western goods, they will realize how worthless they are and they will listen to the missionary about their god. That is an effective strategy, by the way.

Read the full text here: http://ffrf.org/publications/freethought-today/articles/the-pirahae-people-who-define-happiness-without-god/

Great info! I hope that some christians read this!