Imagine that you are a human brought to another planet. You are not religious. You haven't any belief in God or the supernatural. On this planet, the aliens are immediately able to cure all your diseases. They can provide you tools that revolutionize the way you grow your food and build your home. They are able to provide you comforts that can improve/change your life forever. It's as if a magician waves his magic wand and gave you, in an instant, more than you could have ever imagined. How would you react?
Here's a video that turns that fiction into non-fiction.
In Papua, New Guinea circa 1993, Jean Pierre Dutilleux came across tribesmen who lived in the isolation of dense tropical rainforests to avoid war. They hadn't any contact with the "outside world." They were hunters and gatherers still living in the Stone Age surrounded by a modern world. The tribesmen had never seen a "white man" before (and even try to wipe the color from his skin). As the original head bangers, when they eat rice for the first time, they hit their heads to express how good it is.
(You can find 13 half-hour episodes in Tribal Journeys - A Window to Another World and Another Time. There are some claims that the videos are a fraud, but you can decide for yourself whether or not you believe that. Additionally, in First Contact, you can hear people from New Guinea speak about their first time seeing a white man. "Did he come from the ground? Did he come from the sky? The water? We were confused.")
There are those in this world who know very little that is modern. Some are refugees from a terrible civil war in the Sudan who think "God grew tired of us." They do not know what a shower is, or what an apartment is, or what an escalator is, or what a light switch is, or what a refrigerator is, or what an alarm clock is. Grown men who have never before seen a toilet. Or a balloon. They have never used electricity. They've never seen an iPhone or video camera. They've never eaten a donut. They don't understand the meaning of a Christmas tree, or who Santa is (as neither are in the Bible and don't seem to connect with Jesus Christ). As General Kazim put succinctly in the movie Sahara: "Don't worry. It's Africa. Nobody cares about Africa."
How does watching these films make you feel? Should we be doing more to bring the living standards up of our fellow man?
Jean-pierre DUTILLEUX (2/4) Dites-moi
Movie Special: God Grew Tired Of Us
DISCUSS!
Original posting by Braincrave Second Life staff on Jul 20, 2011 at http://www.braincrave.com/viewblog.php?id=605
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