I’ve been enjoying the God-botherers since moving back to Masterton. It takes genuine guts to get up and condemn strangers to their face. I’ve been putting their pamphlets on the ground next to my bed, and Eru Hiko-Tahuri’s Māori Boy Atheist, published by the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, wouldn’t be out of place among them.
Hiko-Tahuri grew up in Wairoa in the 70s and 80s at a time when religious belief of one kind or another was simply assumed. Tauparapara containing references to God would preface speeches on marae or at hui. Participation at church—or at church-led youth-camps or social groups—was an important way of bonding with the community. Many of the Māori leaders of that time also had connections with the church (as proof of this, the nation’s politicians are, as I write this, gathered for the yearly rituals at Rātana Pā).
Despite the apparent Christianity of his childhood town, Hiko-Tahuri noticed how the old beliefs seemed to linger on beneath the surface. He relates the story of a Presbyterian minister. After a drowning happened in Hawke’s Bay, the minister prayed to God that the victim’s body would wash-up. After several nights in which his prayers went unanswered, he prayed to Tangaroa instead. The body washed up the next day.
How could a minister of God also believe in Tangaroa? Realising that religion is just as much about what you do as it is what you believe, Hiko-Tahuri realised that it was something you could therefore not do, and began not doing it. He sought answers from the likes of Dinesh D’Souza, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Joseph Campbell, and James Randi. Finally, he concluded that all religions are made-up.
Hiko-Tahuri reheats a few obvious arguments here. He says himself that he doesn’t know much about anthropology or philosophy (he admits he found The God Delusion a hard read). This isn’t necessarily a problem. This book’s appeal was more the fact that Hiko-Tahuri’s childhood religion was linked to his Māoritanga; but his points against the former are generic and largely unrelated to the latter, making for a largely bifurcated read.
Most of the arguments are simply emotional appeals. Yes, many people would be disgusted by the idea that children with bone cancer are suffering because of their misdeeds in a past life (his argument against karma). Many would also be disgusted at the idea that those children died in a cosmic jumble that was wholly indifferent to the last painful judders of electricity running through their enfeebled minds. Both positions give one a delicious sense of outrage.
Neither supplies a reason to hold a positive belief one way or the other.
I’ve never been convinced that, because atheism is the absence of belief in something, human beings are born atheist, and only later brainwashed into becoming religious. It’s an argument held together more by syntax than reason. Peter Hitchens once said something along the lines of, “A whelk has no beliefs; a human being must choose.” Like many people, Hiko-Tahuri was raised believing certain things. Like others, he used the powers of his mind to stop believing in them.
It still wasn’t clear by the end why Christianity was incompatible with Māoritanga. Māori in the late colonial period were sometimes so eager to identify as Christian that they (not very convincingly) interpreted their ancestors as such. Tāmihana Te Rauparaha’s biography of his father, in which he tries to claim him as a devout Christian, is easily contradicted by the fact that Te Rauparaha, on his deathbed, was both confused and annoyed by the Priest administering last rites. Hoani Te Whatahoro Jury’s reading of the Polynesian God Io as a sort of garbled pagan understanding of the Judeo-Christian God was an even more obvious act of historical revisionism.
The first temptation is to say that these two held these “inauthentic” beliefs because they had to to get by in a Pākehā world. This is presuming a lot. Several generations of Māori evidently did hold Christianity as something dear to their hearts. The fact it had sometimes been a tool for colonial oppression did not mean, in other times, that it could not be a way to express and pass on Māori culture. This is the point Eru Hiko-Tahuri misses. Maybe it would have convinced me more had he shouted from a soapbox in the street.