In 1778, the people of Hawaii encountered their first visit from Europeans. Captain Cook arrived while in the process of looking for a place to spend the winter during an attempt to discover a "northwest passage" between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Due to a tragic bit of timing, Cook was mistaken for the local god Lono. This was the start of a chain of events that led to his death at the hands of the natives.
That story was interesting all by itself, certainly, but the events that came after that are of greater interest to me. One of the younger chiefs on the Island of Hawaii at the time was Kamehameha. After the first visits by white men, it became clear that they wouldn't stop coming, and that they represented a grave threat to the survival of the islands and their culture. Kamehameha was the chief who was able, after a decade or so of strife, to unite the islands and create a single kingdom.
During this time of unification, trouble was brewing in the world of Hawaiian religion, and that is the most interesting thing of all to me. Up to this point, the religion of the islands had been built around a system of taboos (kapu in the language). The society was built around the notion that the various gods that ran things there would severely punish anyone who broke a kapu, thus was social order maintained. Kapu sticks were used by chiefs in their processions to show that they had the gods on their side and to indicate to the people that a person of godly importance was in the area. Kapus were set by priests on areas that were hazardous or that they wanted people to stay away from for whatever reason. Everyone on the islands were taught from their first days to obey the limitations indicated by kapus.
When the white people from Europe came, they had no knowledge of the significance of kapus, nor were they interested in obeying the customs of "savages." They were there primarily to re-supply their ships on the trek across the ocean and possibly to trade for island goods such as sandalwood. Consequently, many priests found it quite disturbing that white people managed to break many traditional rules of polite conduct - the sort of things that everyone knew were kapu, even without a visual sign, and yet were never punished by the gods.
In 1790, this situation had nearly come to a head. That was the year Kamehameha died, leaving the new kingdom to be ruled by his son Liholiho. It was also the year that the priests, upset at the notion that anyone could break a kapu without getting zapped by some god or other, urged Liholiho to take part in an experiment. The new king was considered the most important, powerful person in the kingdom. If he were to break a kapu, a particularly important, even vital one, then surely that would compel some action by the offended god or gods. The nature of the experiment was simple. Liholiho was urged to purposely break the kapu against a man sitting to eat at a table set for women.
After a long hesitation, Liholiho agreed. He sat at the table and was not affected by the affront to the gods at all.
The result of this event was huge. The priests and chiefs who learned of it were forced to admit that their religion was wrong, that the gods did not really exist. Hawaii became a nation and society that was godless. In a manner of speaking, that is. Six months after this ground-breaking event, the first Christian missionaries arrived and started to spread their religion into the area, but that's another story.
The thing that impresses me the most about this whole affair is the way the priests and chiefs reacted to the problems with their religion. They saw, almost every day for 20 years, evidence that their religion was wrong, that what they had assumed was true about the way the universe works was actually untrue. Instead of changing some details of their beliefs in an attempt to keep to the "old ways" as long as they could, they faced the basic problem. What is more, they had the courage to test their religion at its central point, and they lived up to the obligation they incurred by making that test. They accepted the results of their test, and admitted that the gods they had grown up believing in and following were nothing but imagination.
Seeing this sort of thing makes me wonder. When we see Christians fiddling around with their Bibles, nearly 2000 years after the death of Jesus, in spite of the fact that the Bible says that Jesus would return while some of his compatriots were still alive, one has to wonder. If the Hawaiians could face the facts and willingly discard their religion when faced with good evidence that it was wrong, why can't Christians muster up that same sort of courage?