The next hop was a short hop to Mangareva on the Gambier Islands. There were a lot of islands north of the route I took but few with airfields. I would still prefer ditching in a lagoon if I had to go down rather than the middle of the ocean so I kept track of the closest land all the way.
The Gambier Islands are known for the quality of pearls found in the lagoons. When the French stole the Polynesian Islands including the Gambiers, they also sent Catholic priests. Unfortunately for the natives, the priest sent there was a true believer. Father Laval was such a dedicated Christian that he single-handedly brought about the complete destruction of the native culture and replaced it with Catholicism. His memoirs speak of the delight he felt in destroying ‘heathen’ temples. When he arrived, the island population was 6,000. By the time he was transferred back to Tahiti a mere 450 people had survived his reign of terror, but they were Christians with saved souls. He had made the natives build a cathedral that would seat 2,000, four times the population left alive from his reign of terror.
This is something I can’t quite get my head around:, how do people become so sure of their religion that they are willing to kill and destroy for it? What is it about religion that makes people so sure of their own truth?
Religion is foremost an attempt to come to terms with the inexplicable; those things such as creation, life, birth, and death. Since it inherently deals with the inexplicable, religion serves Man best when it assumes no certainties. It is ludicrous to state as certainties things about which Man can never be certain. As Voltaire pointed out, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.”
Maybe it is this dichotomy that is the problem. Since the subjects of religion are forever uncertain and men, individuals as well as groups don’t like uncertainty, and since men feel uncomfortable with uncertainty, they assume a certainty where no certainty is possible. They ignore the impossible; like Jesus being born fourteen years apart in the two Gospels, or an illiterate Mohammed writing the Koran, or Joseph Smith getting handed golden plates that mysteriously and conveniently disappeared just in time. No, really the angel took them back. Hogwash. The uncertainty of these fundamental questions is so uncomfortable that the average Joe willingly accepts the impossible in order to gain certainty on all of these uncomfortable questions. With that certainty seems to come the fanaticism. Maybe the fanaticism covers the doubt which is in all of us, must be in all of us, for the uncertainty is the truth and people inherently know the truth, even when they won’t admit it to themselves.
I got out and stretched as the plane was refueled. I looked around at what had once been a paradise, but religion had turned into a backwater. Air Tahiti only comes out once a week, so I was the only plane on the airstrip. No one was even monitoring the radio and I landed without having to contact anyone. I made sure that every tank was topped up completely. There was no point in staying out here and it was early enough that inside a half hour, I was airborne again on route for Easter Island
Go back to the Table of Contents
Copyright Rod O'Steele © 2009