An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"

The anecdote stages a moral paradox at the heart of missionary religion: if ignorance of Christian doctrine exempts someone from damnation, then evangelizing can appear to increase rather than reduce spiritual risk. The Inuit hunter’s final question exposes the unintended cruelty that can accompany well-meant instruction—introducing concepts of sin, guilt, and eternal punishment where they were previously absent. In Dillard’s hands, the story functions less as ethnography than as a sharp thought experiment about responsibility, the ethics of proselytizing, and the costs of certain kinds of “knowledge.” It also critiques tidy theological answers by showing how they collapse under a plain, practical question.