no, seriously, i think this is why the indigenous religion is so much more widely scoffed at than others, which are not really any less stupid. i mean,  i'm an atheist, as you know, i don't have time for any of it, but the indigenous stuff is particularly lame because these aren't new ideas to westerners (unlike the eastern religions, which were legitimately something different) but ideas that western culture has already deduced are wrong.

it's not an issue of relativism. it's not about seeing things from a different perspective, or making way for ideas that are different. rather, it's something more akin to a kind of orwellianism: to be respectful of indigenous religious positions, you have to open yourself up to the possibility that basic empirical facts like the shape of the earth or the effects of smoke inhalation are, actually, wrong, and on the strength of evidence that not only wouldn't hold up in a lab but wouldn't even hold up in a court.

i tossed thales out there. he was an early greek philosopher that put forth the theory that inanimate objects have spirits. this is, in fact, as western an idea as anything socrates came up with. but, that was 2500 years ago. and, it's been viewed as a disproven and false theory in the west for most of the last 2500 years.

we could take about a lot of things, here. dna. migrations. the age and size of the earth.

maybe indigenous cultural leaders should be focusing less on retaining ideas that everybody else in the world knows are wrong and more focused on finding ways to modernize and synthesize what's left of the culture, to facelift it into something that is less self-parodying.

because, i'll make fun of christians. and i'll make fun of muslims. and i'll make fun of jews. but it's never as personal as it is when i make fun of people with indigenous beliefs, because they haven't developed that distance - they haven't entered modernity.

i want to help them, not make fun of them. but they make it hard...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.