p195

ここで述べていることはいわゆる狭い意味の「 操作主義 」とはまったく違う．狭い意味の操作主義では物理量は操作を離れては「ない」とされるが，そんなことは論理的にも主張できない．何かあるものがあってそのある側面を「操作」で捉えることができるときのみ科学のなかに曖昧さなく組み込める，と言っているに過ぎない．

絶対的真理などない，それは生に相対的なものである

生を離れて真理はない．絶対的真理の存在を信ずることは誤謬である．これを明確に書いている本はあまりないが，次 の本 (アマゾンのPirah¥~{a}[ピダ ハン ]族の言語民族誌) は説得力 がある:

D. L. Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes---Life and language in the Amazonian jungle (Pantheon 2008).  とくにその第3部．ただしそれが切実に感じられるためにはその前を読む方がよい．その抜粋ノートは books の religionのところにある．

Chapter 17. Converting the missionary

p263

SIL missionaries do not preach or baptize, They avoid pastor-like roles. Rather, SIL believes that the most effective way to evangelize indigenous peoples is to translate the New Testament into their language. Since SL also believes that the Bible is literally the word of God, then it is reasoned, the Bible should be able to speak for itself.

p265

This night, I decided to tell them something very personal about myself---something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirah¥~{a}s how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story.

 When I concluded, the Pirah¥~{a}s burst into laughter. This was unexpected to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like ``Praise god!'' with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them. 

 ``Why are you laughing?'' I asked.

 ``She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirah¥~{a}s don't kill themselves,'' they answered.

 They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I have loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirah¥~{a}s to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences.

 ``Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?''

 I said, ``Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words.''

 ``Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?''

 They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now know, the Pirah¥~{a}s believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting.

p268

 The difficulty at the core of my reason for being among the Pirah¥~{a}s was that the message that I had staked my life and career on did not fit the Pirah¥~{a}s' culture. At the very least, one lesson to draw here was that my confidence in the universal appeal of the spiritual message I was bringing was ill-founded. The Pirah¥~{a}s were not in the market for a new worldview.

From the first record of contact with the Pirah¥~{a}s and the Muras, a closely related people, in the eighteenth century, they had developed a reputation for ``recalcitrance''---no Pirah¥~{a}s are known to have ``converted'' at any period of their history.

p270

The immediacy of experience principle means that if you haven't experienced something directly, your stories about it are largely irrelevant. This rendered them relatively impermeable to missionary efforts based on stories of long-ago past that no one alive has witnessed.

The Pirah¥~{a}s' rejection of the gospel caused me to question my own faith. This surprised me, I was no novice after all. I had graduated at the top of my class from Moody Bible Institute. I had preached on the streets of Chicago, spoken in rescue missions, gone door-to-door, and debated atheists and agnostics in my own culture. I was well trained in apologetics and personal evangelism.

 But I had now also been trained as a scientist, where evidence was crucial, where I would demand for any claim evidence similar to what the Pirah¥~{a}s were now requesting of me. I did not have the evidence that they wanted. I only had subjective support for what I was saying, my own feelings.

 Another edge to the Pirah¥~{a}s' challenge was my growing respect for them. There was so much about them that I admired. They were a sovereign people. And they were in effect telling me to peddle my goods elsewhere. They were telling me that my message had no purchase among them.

 All the doctrines and faith I had held dear were a glaring irrelevancy in this culture. They were superstition to the Pirah¥~{a}s. And they began to seem more and more like superstition to me.

 I began to seriously question the nature of faith, the act of believing in something unseen. Religious books like the Bible and the Koran glorified this kind of faith in the nonobjective and counterintuitive---life after death, virgin birth, angels, miracles, and so on. The Pirah¥~{a}s' values of immediacy of experience and demand for evidence made all this seem deeply dubious. 

p272

 The Pirah¥~{a}s made me question concepts of truth that I had long adhered to and lived by. The questioning of my faith in God, coupled with life among the Pirah¥~{a}s, led me to question what is perhaps an even more fundamental component of modern thought, the concept of truth itself. Indeed, I decided that I lived under delusion---the delusion of truth. God and truth are two sides of the same coin. Life and mental well-being are hindered by both, at least if the Pirah¥~{a}s are right. And their quality of inner life, their happiness and contentment, strongly supports their values.

p273

The Pirah¥~{a}s are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. They don't believe in a heaven above us, or a hell below us, or that any abstract cause is worth dying for. They give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like. And the vision is appealing.

 Is it possible to live a life without the crutches of religion and truth? The Pirah¥~{a}s do so live. They share some of our concerns, of course, since many of our concerns derive from our biology. But they live most of their lives outside these concerns because they have independently discovered the usefulness of living one day at a time.

They have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirah¥~{a}s is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying with malaria. Does this make them more primitive? Many anthropologists have suggested so, which is why they are so concerned about finding out the Pirah¥~{a}s' notion about God, the world, and creation.