MBA Māori Boy Atheist

By Eru Hiko-Tahuri

This is my story. It's my journey along the path to atheism. As a child I attended many churches. I learnt a lot along way. I tried so hard to believe. Harder than most I think but as I grew and as I researched and read I slowly realized that I could no longer believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eru Hiko-Tahuri
• Release date: Oct 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311524102

Eru Hiko-Tahuri

Radio host, Musician, Airbrush Artist, and now Author. I love to learn and to share the lessons along the way!

Book preview

Maori Boy Atheist

Eru Hiko Tahuri

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Ngaire McCarthy, former President of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, and one of the first Māori atheists I had heard of. Her activism made it possible for me to find others, and to realise, more than I knew, that I was not alone.

This book is also written for those who wish to exercise their right to think for themselves.

Māori Boy Atheist

First published as an ebook Smashwords.com in 2015

Updated and published in 2022 by the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (NZARH) and the Pacific Islands Secular Association 64 Symonds St, Grafton Auckland, New Zealand, aided by the Secular Association of NSW, Sydney, and the Association Internationale de Libre Pensee, Paris. Māori and french versions of this book are also available.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter 10

Glossay of Māori terms

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the author

Index

Foreword

Christelle Patin

The atheist Maori boy is part of a more global movement of increasing irreligion in New Zealand society, marked among young adults, especially males. In 1981, 6.8% of the population declared themselves to be atheists, agnostics or no religion compared to 1% in 1951. In recent decades, the trend has increased to 42% in 2013, including 46% of Māori. However, beyond the statistical figures, the reality of achieving this liberation on a daily basis is more complex, even arduous, when one belongs to an ethnic community that incorporates religious beliefs as one of the foundations of its common culture.

And it is the strength of the testimony of the freethinking Māori Eru Hiko-Tahuri to assert himself as an atheist by braving the risks of discrimination in an already unfavourable Māori job market or exclusion by his own. It takes courage to face the moral judgement of others in the community, exposing oneself to misunderstanding, to the scorn of having become a lost soul or even to being considered a Pākehā, a non-Māori New Zealander with European roots. Why such rejection, the author asks, especially since there is authentic Maori thought?

This is the tone of this testimony, which oscillates between introspection and demonstration. It gives us an inside view of a path of rupture and awareness of man's capacity for emancipation. It can sometimes take the form of an essay trying to explain the omnipresence of the religious phenomenon.

The political importance of the author's approach is considerable, both at the individual level of a man of free thought and at the level of the stakes of a possible sovereignty of indigenous peoples, freed from the religious yoke.

Christianity, colonisation and acculturation

Often undertaken before the colonisation of the islands, the evangelisation of Oceania took place against a backdrop of religious rivalry (between Catholic and Protestant Christian missions) and national competition (between the great imperial powers such as France and Great Britain). It contributed to a major transformation of island societies.

The London Missionary Society (LMS), founded in 1795, aimed to evangelise the Oceanian populations, which the explorers' accounts presented as having very free morals, between Cannibals and Vahines. It established itself in Tahiti in 1797, competing with the Catholics in 1840. Protestant missions shared the Pacific islands: Methodists in Tonga and Fiji, Presbyterians in Vanuatu, American Protestants in Hawaii and German Lutherans in New Guinea. While Australia in 1788 and New Zealand from 1837 onwards quickly became English settlements, Tahiti was finally conceded to France in 1842 as compensation for the taking of possession of New Zealand by the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. New Caledonia was annexed by France in 1853.

These colonisations were all marked by a demographic slaughter of the indigenous peoples due to epidemics, wars of pacification (such as the Maori wars in New Zealand from 1845- 1872 or the Kanak revolts of 1859 and 1878 in New Caledonia) and the trafficking of labour in the mines or plantations.

The distribution of power between the chieftaincy and clan systems is not easily understood by Europeans, who try to find a single interlocutor. Some chiefs took advantage of the introduction of a new religion and the support of missionaries, sometimes with the help of weapons supplied by Europeans, to establish a new authority over other customary chiefs.

Writing, through the systematic translation of religious texts into more than a hundred local languages, was not only a means of mass conversion, but also an instrument used by the local aristocracy to increase its power and gain recognition from the Europeans. In this way,

Christian religions were reinforced by the establishment of Oceanic kingdoms.

For example, in 1819 the LMS missionaries imposed the Pomare Code, which prohibited Tahitian dances deemed obscene, public cultural events and the practice of tattooing. At the same time, following the arrival of missionaries from New England, the King of Hawaii (Kamehameha II) proclaimed the abandonment of traditional religious practices and ordered the destruction of temples and images of gods. In Wallis, in 1870, Queen Amelia's Code imposed fines on those who missed Catholic mass. As for the Treaty of Waitangi, a key