Judaism
Primitive Revelation? Is Humanity Ascending to or Descending from Perfection
Abstract
What reads as grotesque in Berosus appears in the bible as so true and so natural that we, with our western credulity, have treated it as history, and have imagined, when we adopted these fables, that we have been discarding mythology.Ernest Renan, The People of Israel
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 31 October 2008
Origins in Religion
Samuel Zwemer wrote a history of The Origin of Religion in 1935, updated in its third edition of 1945. The author writes, as he proudly acknowledges in his first paragraph, “in the firm faith that God is the creator of the universe and that he made man in his image”. So the book is useless scientifically. Science cannot and does not begin with assumptions. Zwemer already knows that God has revealed religion to humankind, since when it has degenerated to the state it is now, although Christianity is exempt from the degeneration. Christianity was a new revelation which managed to preserve itself from degeneration in one of its branches, the one to which any Christian author belongs. It is the story of the Judaeo-Christian bible and so must be true. Everything else is merely confirmation of it, or is wrong.
Science looks for evidence objectively, then it proposes explanations of the evidence as hypotheses and tests them against the evidence, including any new evidence that has to be found, as necessary, until the best hypothesis emerges and the others can be discarded. The idea that religion was revealed by God is a hypothesis, although a doubt is cast by its invoking an entity that itself has never been proved to exist, God. Doubt is then cast on the approach to testing the hypothesis when the investigator begins with a “firm” conviction that it is true. How can such an investigator examine the evidence objectively? For him the issue is decided, and the “investigation” can only be a farce and a travesty. It is not a thought that troubles any Christian, but is probably why books like this disappear without trace.
The author can also be criticized in respect of his use of the bible. He says that believers must use the bible as a source book in their studies of religious origins. Quite so, but that means subjecting it to the same critical standards that any scientist would apply to any such ancient book. It is not scientific to begin with the assumption that anything the bible suggests on the matter in hand must be true. Christians assume it is reliable without any critical assessment because they believe that God “wrote” it—it is the word of the Lord—and God cannot be wrong.
Now those who accept the scientific method and eschew religious “belief” can show from evidence that beliefs or convictions, however strongly held, are at best as likely to be wrong as right. Indeed, because real life is not a simple choice of this or that but often has many possibilities, belief is more often wrong than right unless it is based upon a critical appraisal of the facts. It means questioning and testing the facts, and that is what believers will not do.
When the bible is examined critically, it is found to have the same features as other ancient books. It is not authored by a single author but by many, so is not consistent, and has in it the beliefs of ancient people that are now known not to be so, so it is not inerrant. When the characteristics of an ancient book show it to have been written by human beings then extraordinary evidence would be needed for anyone to suppose it was written supernaturally. Unless God meant to fool his disciples, it is an ancient book written with religious intentions, but it is no certain authority about anything, and essentially illustrates ancient beliefs and circumstances. The belief that it is God’s word does not make it so, does not change its nature, but Christians think anything they believe is true.
The bible is a valuable book of its kind, but it cannot be accepted as the work of any god, unless a god simply means ancient human beings. It is a sourcebook for ancient religion in certain times and parts of the world but cannot over ride evidence for other periods and places, and has no particular general authority, and, if the bible is to be used as a source then the situation and purpose of the original writers have to be taken into account.
Zwemer says that his conclusions are based on evidence—“the historical method of investigation”—despite his telling us that he had already decided upon his conclusions at the outset. He means he will fish from the available evidence whatever suits his assumption, and he does it from a variety of nineteenth century academics, mostly with the same convictions as himself, but some without them though otherwise denigrated by Christians for being anti religion.
In Victoria’s time the sciences, especially some like anthropology and archaeology were still in their childhood, and most academics were still middle class churchgoers. Unlike Darwin, many of these could not bear to contemplate a contradiction between real world facts and the bible, so they poured facts into the biblically shaped pot, calling those who did not anti theists. They knew that most of those who were critical of the bible in the face of natural evidence were not atheists, so they were anti theists! Theists still, to this day, cite the Victorian professor of Assyriology, Sayce, that archaeology has never contradicted the bible. If it was ever true in any sense, it is certainly not now.
The way Zwemer offers his facts from “the historical method of investigation” is not in the spirit of the method, the scientific method as applied to history. He gives us supposedly authoritative statements from selected scholars, quoted like citations from the bible or pronouncements from Catholic divines, meant to end all discussion, and usually without any evidence supporting them. It is the believer’s method, the Christian method. They believe because someone authoritative—initially parents and vicars, then anyone whose views support their indoctrinated notions—tells them they ought to and so belief is inculcated into them.
Monotheism or Henotheism?
Essentially the evidence Zwemer thinks proves a primitive revelation followed by a decline and decay of proper observance is that early people and allegedly all modern primitive tribes believed in one god—humanity began as monotheists. His mistake is that, by the time people had evolved the concept of gods, they believed in a god of their own tribe who had a special relationship with them. The tribal god derived from the tribal totem or ancestor, the primordial way of recognizing family relationships. So, it is true that each tribe in a sense was monotheistic even though they knew other tribes had other gods. It is called henotheism rather than monotheism. There were actually many gods, but one was favoured.
The Christian cannot gainsay this because the bible confirms it. Yehouah was the god of the tribe of Israelites but the Elamites, Ammonites, Philistines, and so on, had different gods who were sometimes named as Kemosh, Dagon, Molech, and such, all sons of El, as was Yehouah. The Jewish scriptures tell us that El was truly the high god not Yehouah. Christians are worshipping a junior God, just as the Gnostics said. Maybe that is why they are often so wicked.
It shows that evidence that tribes favoured their own particular god is not evidence of a primitive revelation by the One True God unless Christians accept that God has revealed Himself on multiple occasions to divers peoples under divers names and with different traditions and emphases. If they accept this then there is no basis for Christian exclusivity, or any other type of it, and there never was, so all the supposed Christian martyrs died in vain. If God could manifest as a man called Jesus, who can say He did not manifest Himself as a Roman emperor on another occasion? If God could reveal Himself to different people in different ways—and He does even in the bible—then what was wrong with polytheism and the daimones. All were simply God revealing Himself to different people.
Greek philosophers could figure out that a monotheistic God could appear to human beings in any form He chose, so all the daimones were just manifestations of the One God—something so reasonable that no Christian or Moslem can accept it, and like modern Moslem martyrs, the Christians were ready to waste their God given lives for a mistaken belief. The one thing Christians are good at is inventing ways of harmonizing their false beliefs with real life. When it does not involve religion, it is called dishonesty. So Christians can find in tribal gods evidence of their monotheistic Lord, but it is less than honest to do it.
Professor Zwemer’s dishonesty, and that of Christians and believers in the patriarchal god generally, cannot be ignored or excused, but what can be excused is that most western religious scholars in the twentieth century did not recognize that religion was not always, or for most of its existence, seen as something separated from the everyday life of the people. Today it is, even for those who say they live every moment of their lives according to their beliefs, and the reason is that their beliefs have no consequence for everyday life that normal civilized living does not already have. In the west we parcel off subjects for study into separate bundles for convenience, then come to think of them as separate.
Human beings have always been social animals living in bands or tribes, and tribal communal activities included the roots of religion, as it is now known, but which then would have been necessary but commonplace activities—play, celebrating, mourning, delineating time, space and social distinctions in ways that everyone could see and accept. This was how religion began. A competition between the clans of the tribe to find the champion wrestler would have been a religious occasion in the primordial sense. As an annual event, it would have marked time, and it would have taken place in a reserved space, thus marking out space. It determined a tribal role, thus marking out status, and it was an occasion, probably ending with a feast, for the whole tribe to meet, make friends, and bond together socially, thus marking out the group in a distinctive way. It was a cultural event.
When people settled into an agricultural life, a variety of annual events to do with survival had to be marked, notably the New Year, often connected with sowing, and the harvest when the first fruits were gathered, being two prominent examples. These times were festivals and when people began to believe in spirits and gods, these spirits and gods were rewarded with thanksgivings and worship in praise and gratitude. Special places for these celebrations were called sacred, and the ceremonies became holy days and then holidays. Zwemer would not have appreciated these matters and probably could not because he already knew religions were revealed and did not evolve with society.
Primitive Revelation
Zwemer makes his case for an origin of religion in a primitive revelation using the work of professor father Wilhelm Schmidt (The Origin of the Idea of God, 1934). Schmidt saw polytheism—the generation of an “impenetrable phalanx” of new gods—as a decline from an original revelation which has to be reconstructed as well as it can “by dint of laborious research”. Schmidt’s “research” might have been laborious but it is not research in any scientific way and is all the more laborious because it is attempting the impossible. The original primitive revelation cannot be reconstructed because it never happened—the evidence just does not support it. So what is laborious is the exertion of Schmidt’s Christian ingenuity in finding it in the evidence. In fairness to father Schmidt, he did important work in areas that were not related to religion, but that is not the case in his magnum opus.
Zwemer again frankly declares, at the start of his argument, that he would rather believe the first verse of Genesis than unbelieving mathematicians and geologists. As the unbelieving mathematicians and geologists evidently disagree, where does the inquisitive reader stand? If wise, the reader will consider all the evidence and assess it without prejudice, for otherwise they might as well believe anything.
The believer thinks the bible is God’s revelation, and so thinks religion must have arisen as a similar revelation. But what is the point of laboriously researching evidence for it when the original conviction is based on unquestioning belief? To believe unquestioningly in a primitive revelation should save all that laborious spurious research. To begin with a revelation that necessitates a previous revelation is like thinking God is needed to create the world but God Himself needs no creator. Nothing is gained in trying to prove an earlier revelation from evidence when the only reason to do so is belief in a later one based on no evidence. Moreover, proof that a mechanistic interpretation of the world is wrong does not prove that the world was therefore created by God, the sort of error Christians constantly make. Similarly doubts about how religion began realistically is not proof it was made unrealistically in an imagined revelation by an imaginary being. Zwemer cannot see any way out of this, and to find comfort and justify his own inconsistency and inadequacy, he cites as authorities a lot of nineteenth century scientists who simultaneously believed in God.
Zwemer declares his unqualified agreement with archbishop Trench that Genesis 3, the temptation of Adam and Eve, is the most important chapter in the whole bible. Without it the rest is unintelligible. Trench is correct in this, but that does not make Genesis 3 true. It simply means that the rest of the bible depends and elaborates on it. Genesis 3 is a fable. It is true, not literally, but as an allegory or a cautionary tale. The rest of the bible is therefore the same. It too is allegorical and cautionary, and particularly the story of Jesus whose cruel death was meant to be in atonement for Adam’s sin.
The unity of the Old Man in Adam is the postulate of the unity of the New Man in Christ.Dr B M Warfield, Studies in Theology
It means Christians have to follow Christ in sacrificing themselves for other people because humans have certain flaws. They are social animals but have not adequately developed truly social instincts. No other interpretation makes universal sense, and it is not hard to discern, if Christians only read their bibles, because Christ says it himself in several different ways.
Of course, many modern Christians will support Zwemer and Trench about Genesis 3, accepting it as the reason for Christ’s atoning cricifixion, but many freely ignore that all men of all races are notionally descended from the mythical Adam and Eve, and all are equally sinful. The fable states categorically that the races of humanity signify nothing—everyone is human—yet these Christians happily boast of their own racism. Evangelicals openly say they will not vote for Obama because he is a nigger! It proves their own sinfulness, according to the Christian bible, and that they are selective about what the accept of God’s Word. They are hypocrites, yet are blind to it, and blind to the fact, if they are correct in their beliefs, that God is not blind to their insincerity of faith however sincere they think they are.
What though of the Schmidt hypothesis Zwemer propounds? His first exhibit in evidence is the cave paintings of the stone age hunters of western Europe, which have “religious significance”. How are our champions of revelation so sure of this? It is belief. They are believed to be of religious significance. It is an assumption based on the inaccessibility of the paintings. They can have had no use, and cannot even have been useful for social bonding—how many people could have seen them? Believers in revelation will never accept that magic can have been of any value in the formation of religion, but these paintings could have had magical significance.
Perhaps the significance was scientific. Religion was often a sort of primitive science in that it offered explanations. The stone age hunters might have considered it a scientific explanation that the earth was the source of all life, and the paintings were therefore a symbol of it. Admittedly here is an indirect link with religion, but it illustrates that the earliest people had no conception of religion as anything like ours. For them it was science, but that also was a distinction they did not have. In truth, for them, it was all culture, the set of habits and beliefs that distinguished their tribe from others, and themselves from the brutes and savages. Let us not quibble then about the cave paintings being of “religious significance” so long as we appreciate there was not much like our understanding of “religion” in it. Indeed, we read:
Religion has just as many aspects as human life and the mind of man.S M Zwemer
It is a good expression of what “religion” was to these early people, because it was entirely absorbed in human life at this early stage. It had not begun its own existence as a separate sprout from it. The quizzical marks indicate that the aspects of life that eventually coalesced into religion, as yet had not done. Zwemer’s confusion is immediately clear when he ties religion to belief in God:
Because humanity itself finds its roots in God, religion does also—unless we begin with an anti-theistic bias.S M Zwemer
Science begins with a bias against everything that is not proven, so its anti theistic bias is not unfair. Facts must be allowed to speak for themselves, and any bias will not let them. A theistic bias is just what Zwemer begins with. He believes God created human beings and gave them religion, but given that God is an all powerful and perfectly moral being, Christians tell us, we cannot expect Him to behave like an animal Himself, can we? When we find He does, then the Christian hypothesis is vitiated. A God that makes an apeman in His own image is an apeman God. Christians cannot believe that. Yet the overwhelming evidence is that humans began as a primate, not dissimilar to modern apes, and had a common ancestor with them from which we all evolved. If God made us, He was not the divine potter of the bible making us new from mud, but chose to do it by making changes to a blueprint He had used already.
Then again, since humanity evolved from an apelike ancestor—an animal which could not think about its salvation consciously as humanity does—it could not have imagined a God. Or do Christians believe their cats and dogs believe in God too. It gets to be plain why believers cannot accept evolution, and why evolution really does contradict the bible. Zwemer begins by discarding the idea of evolution, despite the evidence for it, just because it cannot be squared with the bible, then calls those who do not take such a biased and unscientific stance anti theistic.
Science
Zwemer’s own citations, particularly of pre twentieth century scientists, show they were not at all anti theistic. Most were theists, as most people were then. Yet enough of them were scholarly and honest enough to follow the properly collected and tested evidence to wherever it was leading, and that was away from belief in God. Science is not biased to conclude it has no need of the hypothesis of God. It is where the evidence led. Bias is unfounded belief. It is Zwemer and his fellow Christian believers who are biased, or, more accurately, dishonest, because they choose to be biased knowing the facts. Bias is more commonly the result of ignorance.
Science itself evolved. It was not just created small but perfect in itself, although Christians find evolution of any kind and anything hard to comprehend. As it evolved, things fell into place piecemeal until the method was properly established. Nothing was excluded from the outset, least of all God, when most scientists were clergymen, but, principle by principle, it was built up.
Among them was the importance and the necessity of skepticism. The Greek skeptics would accept nothing as true because the sophists could find arguments to “prove” anything. Scientific skepticism begins by believing nothing until it is verified by repeatable tests, tests that must be capable of giving a negative answer. At least one outcome must be possible that will disprove the proposition under test. Science has valid tests for deciding what should be believed, otherwise skepticism prevails. For Christians, Christianity cannot be disproved. Any test of it that might disprove it, they reject.
Science has come to accept certain things as true because they have been multiply verified. The world is objectively real and natural, ideas that began as working assumptions that could have been proved wrong because tests based on them would have consistently failed. They did not. The working assumptions are therefore correct. As the basis of all scientific tests, they could be disproved at any time, but so far have stood up. Science works. Its tests prove sound. Their validity proves its assumptions of reality and naturality are sound too.
Given the opportunity to observe and test phenomena, science has shown over and over again its ability to explain them, meaning a model can be devised that predicts the behaviour. Some things that happen only rarely are hard to test, and technological advances always produce new data that require explaining. So science has not explained everything, and science itself has discovered that not everything can be explained.
Rare events can seem to be unique, and cannot be observed scientifically, so conceivably they could be supernatural. But when rare events have come within the scope of science, they have proved to be natural, which gives scientists the confidence to say that everything is likely to be natural. So no phenomenon can be assumed supernatural even by believers. The supernatural only seems it because science has not been able to investigate it and arrive at a natural explanation. It means that a natural explanation ought to be sought before anything can be declared supernatural.
Christians reject this because the supposed resurrection of Christ has a lot of possibly natural explanations that ought to be considered before the supernatural explanation preferred by Christians should be adopted. Christians believe it was a miracle, and this type of belief means they are sure it was, not that they think it was. They will not consider any more likely explanation because they want the miracle to be true, and sadly that does not make it so. It is the victory of hope over reason. It is gullibility not skepticism. Christianity is fundamentally anti science, but science will examine evidence for God, and has done. Belief fails scientific tests, and so cannot be accepted by science. It is simply unscientific.
Religion or Religions
Is the history of religion different from the history of religions? Apparently it is not, at least in general usage, but that being so, it is the cause of more confusion. The history of religions invites us to start with every religion we can identify and trace them back to their individual origins. If the historical method is to be used, it means we cannot rely on any religion’s own theological history because it is all too often mythical. Zwemer admits that the true source of a religion is often an older one, and that invites us to consider religions as evolving rather than revealed, the solution he rejects. The older religion will similarly have its origins in a still older one, and so on to the origin of all religions—the origin of religion—the primitive revelation or a natural emergence from society.
Zwemer thinks that religion developed from the primitve revelation but also degenerated. Is Christianity then a development or a degeneration? We can guess what the Christian will say to that. Degeneration of anything is rarely thought of as good. If Christianity has degenerated in some way, what should Christians look for to find signs of it, and to be sure their own variety of it is not degenerate? On the other hand, if Christianity is admittedly changing by developing, and has developed from Christ’s original revelation, how are Christians to distinguish degenerating changes from progressive ones? Apparently, Christianity is exempt from all this because it is the one true religion under the constant guidance of the Holy Spirit. And so it is for all the varieties of it, and doubtless all other religions, for their supporters.
M Brünner thought the history of humanity was the history of religions. It is another statement misleading in being half true. In the western tradition, religion is separated out as a distinct activity, but in many, perhaps most, other parts of the world, religion is not separate from culture. Religion is an aspect of culture and life, and the boundaries between them are not discernable. Religion is culture. Western anthropologists and sociologists ask people about their religion in other parts of the world, and have to explain what they mean, thereby imposing a western viewpoint on to those who do not natively see it our way.
So, the history of humanity is not the history of religion because most people do not know what we mean by religion, but it is true if the culture of any society is considered as its religion, if true religion naturally includes all culture. Then it would embrace much that we do not think is particularly religious. By saying that the history of humanity is the history of religion, we force a Christian view of religion—the western view—on to other people who do not have this view. Then besides giving a wrong impression to the reader, the scholars fool themselves.
As Christians think their religion was revealed to them, it does not follow that others do. For many, religion was not revealed to them but grew from their own ethnic origins. They and their religion grew together once some mythical father had founded their tribe. This, of course, can be seen as a revelation in itself, but mythical fathers are usually accepted even by westerners as being, er… mythical, and so the revelation was mythical too. Yet Zwemer thinks it shows that all cultures were founded by God in His primitive revelation—a revelation akin to that made through Abraham or Jesus—that founded a tribe. Yet the tribe evolved and its culture evolved with it, and culture included their religious practices and myths. Here is a classical chicken and egg problem. Christians like the Fall or slip downwards theory, the degeneration from an ideal theory, but the characteristic of human beings, conditioned by their social nature and its binding cement of language and conversation, is progress. Human society mainly progresses from the small and unsophisticated to the large and sophisticated. It does not begin with a divine revelation inducing a golden age from which everything thereafter is a decline and a disappointment. Such ideas emerge naturally as myths, or are later impositions by conquerors or by advanced civilizations trying to maintain an imperial hegemony.
Religion is as old as the oldest records of mankind, and they are concerned with the supernatural, according to Le Roy, The Religion of the Primitives (1932). So religion is not very old at all, maybe a mere 5000 years. The cavemen whose cave paintings were of “religious significance” are tens of thousands of years older. Do not expect Christian apologists to be consistent.
We must seek the origin of religion in the psychology of man, not of civilized man, but of man the farthest removed.S Reinach, Cults, Myths and Religions
Humanity evolved and religion evolved as human culture from the simple social activities of these far removed men. Now “man the farthest removed” is barely a man at all, and barely thinks at all. That is in reality. In Christian myth, it is Adam, a full man miraculously made by a perfect God that requires him to obey and venerate Him. Unfortunately, the perfect God was not perfect enough to make Adam both obedient to His every command and free to do as he liked. It turns out that God is unable to do the impossible by making opposites simultaneously true. A man is either obedient and so not free, or he is free and so not obedient. Not being obedient is being sinful, so anyone who values free will and wishes to assert it is automatically a sinner.
Adam was willing to forego his free will and obey God, but the serpent persuaded Eve that they were losing something important, and she took it upon herself to be free, persuading Adam it was the better choice. Not being obedient was not to God’s liking, so He punished the primordial pair for disobeying. Being free is a sin to Christians, no doubt the reason why they want us all to be enslaved to Christianity, and like to force feed nonChristians as if they were making paté de fois gras out of us, and end up roasting us like ducks.
Zwemer accuses Reinach of being anti Christian because he considers the hypothesis of a primitive revelation as “gratuitous and puerile”. Yet the ones who propose primitive revelation, Christians, are indeed gratuitous and puerile because they are either ignorant like schoolboys or ignore plain reality with no good reason in favour of their own prejudices. If Christians propose the hypothesis of a primitive revelation for gratuitous and puerile reasons they it is fairly and properly described as such. Thus the hypothesis of the primitive revelation being described as gratuitous and puerile is not merely an anti Christian prejudice. One does not set traps for rats just out of an anti rat prejudice, but because familiarity and observation shows they spread diseases, and that justifies our apparent prejudice. When there is sound reason then a consequent action or description is not a prejudice.
Max Müller (1823-1900) had the idea that original religion was henotheistic, a form of polytheism but with a king of the gods, essentially like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in none of which is God alone in the spirit world. All have angels, demons and Satan as subordinate gods. God is the king of the dead, who all live in God’s kingdom, if blessed, and in the fires of hell if not.
He was partly right. Early belief in gods was a belief in a tribal god who was one of many, each tribe having their own. Then at some stage, perhaps when tribes began to coalesce into nations, a king of the gods was the national god. Later, empires required an imperial god, and the residue of imperialism or cultural imperialism, once trade became advanced, was a high god that covered an extended culturally similar region. So a high god was automatically surrounded by sons and lesser gods. It was henotheism, but it was not the beginning of religion. Earlier people had believed in a mother then a father spirit, and before that in a totemic nonanthropomorphic power. It is henotheism that Christians have clung on to as evidence of a primitive revelation.
There is evidence that all humans arose from a small band of apes migrating out of Africa. An hypothesis of a single primitive revelation must be applied to this small band for one revelation to suffice. But Christians would be unwise to depend on the idea, because it might prove to be an artifact of the genetical method it is based upon. It is also hard to conceive of God revealing monotheism to such a primitive group of ape men while telling them they had been made in his image.
Reading Christian “evidence” is sure to raise a laugh. It is certainly puerile, whether gratuitous or not. We saw that Zwemer in his first paragraph declare his firm belief that God founded religion. Now he criticizes evolutionists for their prejudgements with an authoritative citation:
The study of primitive religion has been altogether too much swayed by the evolutionary hypothesis, and those who wrote on the subject approached it with prejudgements.B Alkema and T J Bezemer
Amongst those who prejudged the issue in favour of evolution were Darwin, Müller and Hegel, all of them Christians—Darwin and Hegel even intended for the ministry—and Hegel never rejected it. Defenders of the primitive revelation are all believers like Zwemer and his hero, father Schmidt. Interestingly, at the time Schmidt completed his work, Dr J J Fahrenfort of Groningen university observed that it is based on presuppositions! For these people, the Christians, double standards are so natural they do not even realize they are using them. Zwemer does not notice it at all and imagines his audience will not either. At the best, he depends on his audience’s good will towards people who have cultivated an aura of virtue, and at worst, he is a liar and a trickster depending on his audience’s credulity and ignorance. So, for Christians, it is fine to have presuppositions and to make prejudgements but it is not if your viewpoint differs. Christian presuppositions and prejudgements do not count, so only critics of belief have them.
Evolution or Revelation
Zwemer now tells us that the idea of religion evolving requires a time when human beings had no gods at all—they were primordial atheists. Indeed, they were atheists, if it is taken to mean “without gods” for literally it means “without god”, but an atheist has taken the decision consciously to reject belief in God, based on evidence or philosophy, whereas these early humans had not yet evolved the conscious idea of God. Primordial human beings were as atheistic as your pet dog. The closest idea to God they had was that of the group leader, for human beings have always been social animals. The dog had no primitive revelation to show respect to you as the dominant animal. You have replaced the pack leader for your pet dog, so you are the nearest thing to a god it knows.
Early humans were the same, they depended on the band and upon a good leader, and ultimately a god is a notional leader of the tribe. Chimpanzees show respect to their leader and even his wives. Leadership and respect for a dominant animal is instinctive in social groups. It creates a social hierarchy called the pecking order from its occurrence in chicken coops. Humans evolved from just such a situation, so the primordial human groups that began to develop their own culture did so beginning with what they did instinctively—they valued the power of the band and respected its leader. No revelation is required or possible in animals without language and with no self consciousness.
It was not so for believers in the patriarchal religions. The revelation of God to Adam in Genesis 3 really happened. It is not allegory or metaphor but history. Christians attempt to prove it really is history, but it fails because all contrary evidence is ignored. W O E Osterly and T Robinson (Hebrew Religion: Its Origin and Development) show that even the Jewish scriptures imply that the Jewish religion evolved. The implication of Moses sojourning with the Midianites is that they taught him of their God Yehouah. He then taught Yehouah to the Israelites who chose Yehouah as their God at Sinai. This original Yehouah was not a good God. He told the Israelites to murder, to commit genocide and treat young girls as sexual fodder. Only later did the religion take on its ethical form under the prophets.
If Midianite, an unknown tribe, was really an allegorical name for the Medes and Persians, then Moses really brought the religion of Yehouah from Persia. The man whom the bible tells us actually did that is Ezra, and Ezra, like Moses, brought a law with him! The allegory of Moses and the Midianites is an allegory of Ezra and the Persians from the time of Darius II. Now it is the story of a religion that did not evolve but was, in a sense, revealed. Judaism was revealed to the people of Judah by being imposed upon them as a policy of the Persian chancellery. Nothing in this hypothesis defies the possibilities of history.
Against it Zwemer cites a Jew who cites the Jewish scriptures as showing that Moses and Abraham were both monotheists before the visit of Ezra:
The covenant idea is as old as Abraham, and the covenant at Sinai, is history, not fiction. The God of Sinai is no mere mountain god or local Kenite god. Monotheism is not the result of an evolutionary process, but it rests upon revelation and existed from the beginning of Israel’s history as portrayed in Genesis.Dr Israel Rabin
The trouble is that Dr Rabin cannot distinguish fiction from fact and can only cite the Jewish scriptures as evidence. These scriptures themselves do not appear in history until the third century BC when the Greek Egyptian kings, the Ptolemies, allies of the Jews and favourable towards the Jerusalem temple at the time, suddenly produce them. History has no way of confirming Moses and Abraham, and other evidence suggests they are myths. Neither can be placed in real history, but Ezra can be securely dated to within a few decades from general evidence and to a precise year, 417 BC, if Darius II was the Shah involved.
Rabin uses sophistry to ease his conscience for lying so blatantly. Is the covenant idea the idea of a covenant between Yehouah and Abraham, or just the idea of a covenant generally in history? The historical idea of a covenant is older than the period in which Abraham is usually set, but the former is part of the myth. Similarly, monotheism does rest upon revelation, and existed from the beginning of Israel’s history, but only as they are portrayed in the collection of myths called the scriptures. Rabin’s history is indeed fictional, like the film Gladiator. Put simply, Dr Rabin is lying.
Writing in 1935, Dr Zwemer thought it encouraging that the tide had turned against evolutionary theory. Now, well past the millennium, Christian propagators of Intelligent Design are still chanting the same mantra, while the evidence for evolution in many different fields grows and grows. Zwemer lists barely remembered and forgotten “authorities” testifying that the tide has turned—Soderblum, Berthelot, Blum-Ernst, Le Roy, Krujit, Bellon, as well as father Schmidt. Schleiter is even cited as saying:
The concept of an omnipotent being may arise spontaneously among the most primitive tribes.F Schleiter, Religion and Culture
It is a cautious and modest statement that can hardly be gainsaid. Note that Schleiter says “may” arise, and adds “spontaneously”. It might not arise, and, even if it does, it is not a revelation but arises “spontaneously”—it happens naturally, without being made to do so! Then again, the tribes he is speaking of are modern. They are primitive by modern standards but they are not historically primitive, the primordial people who had latterly emerged into consciousness, to whom a religious revelation would have been incomprehensible. Schleiter’s sentence is not support for Schmidt’s thesis of the primitive revelation of God to Adam whether real or metaphorical.
Father Schmidt likens the unbeliever to a blind man who cannot talk about colours, or a deaf man who cannot talk about sounds. The simile implies that the believer has a sense absent in the unbeliever, but the only thing the unbeliever lacks is the believer’s gullibility. No anatomist or physiologist has yet been able to find any religious sense even in the most devout of people. A better metaphor is that the believer and unbeliever see equally well, but the believer sees things that are not there. The believer has the ability to see invisible things, as the Christian demigod, Paul, suggests. Society’s judgement on people who can see things that are not there is that they are deluded. Only Christians can get away with it.
Moreover, Schmidt’s cheap metaphors mean nothing in particular as can be seen by using them to argue the opposite sense equally well. The absent sense is the absence of a sense of reason in believers. They then are blind or deaf to reason. Or it is a sense for Islam or communism. It can be used for anything, and so means nothing. The analogy impresses the simple or those already convinced. No one with any sense of reason could accept them, but Christians love to demonstrate their lack of it.
Schmidt thinks all primitive people worshipped a “supreme being”, but only a few are cited—Pigmies, Bushmen, Tierra del Fuegians, some Australian Aboriginals, some Eskimos, and most North American Indians. It seems they call their supreme being “father”, except, that is, when they do not—quite a lot of them. And some, it turns out, do not worship a supreme being! Some of these nevertheless have a “father”. And also, “there is no doubt possible that the name ‘father’” does not denote “physiological paternity”, except where it does because the father being referenced is the founder of the tribe, which is considered as the founder’s offspring. No one except Christians can take this mish mash of nonsense seriously.
It would be odd if people sufficiently advanced to conceive of invisible fathers did not do so because the necessary unity of the tribe is fostered by the notion of a common origin for its members. The tribal father is it. Why should any Christian doubt it when it is in the bible, and is the very source of the name “patriarchal” for these religions derived from Judaism. Abraham is the founding father of both the Jews and the Arabs through different sons of different wives. Righteous Jews looked forward to resting after death in the bosom of Abraham. It makes Abraham sound like their god, not Yehouah. Abraham was originally a tribal father god, but Yehouah for the Jews and Christians was set above him, and Allah for the Moslems, an Arabic religion.
Schmidt’s selective evidence is no better than, indeed is often the same as, that used by Tylor, Frazer, Lang, and such, whom Christians criticize. That an ancestral founding father becomes a supreme being sounds like perfectly good evolution, and all tribes must have claimed to have had a founder, originally a totem. The totem was a power of Nature like other familiar powers of Nature—wind, the heat of the sun, flood, fire, instinctive behaviour, fierce animals. Some hero, a warrior or a sage, someone with a power, became the power of the tribe, uniting with the totem power and becoming the human physiological founder from whom the tribe descended, thereby inheriting the power of the hero and the totem. Such a founder does seem virtually ubiquitous, and the only difference likely in primordial clans is that the actual founder was a woman. Clan founders must originally have been mothers, the origin of mother goddesses. Mothers were replaced by fathers at some stage in history when the role of the father in procreation became clear, something that could not have been so in primordial conditions.
The primitive revelation, according to Schmidt, degenerated from monotheism into polytheism, totemism and fetishism. He counts out totemism as the source of religion because it is never found in the “ethnologically oldest” peoples. If “ethnologically oldest” people are the ones closes to the primordial human tribes then it would have to be taken seriously. But how does Schmidt determine who are these ethnologically ancient people? Obviously people can degenerate culturally, but they need not have started with a primitive revelation, and a degenerate tribe might seem more primitive than one that never advanced beyond its original totemistic standards, but advanced in other ways. Schmidt is certain he knows how to tell them apart but Zwemer does not think it is important enough to explain. Maybe we must believe in God because Schmidt is He, and so can make these difficult judgements. Or maybe the scholarly father is simply in direct contact with God and so just knows what others do not, the normal Christian case. He knows what no one else does.
Much of the putative case for a primitive revelation, then, is the case offered by primitive societies, albeit modern ones. The Christian assumption always is that the first men were brutish and brutal—savage animals ready to kill others of their kind in everyday life. Few wild animals are as savage. Animals do not usually kill their own kind. A few predators might. Social animals live socially for security, and instinctively are less likely to kill their fellows even than solitary predators. Humans sometimes do, but quite infrequently, and cases remain newsworthy. Arguably, murder and warfare in human society is abnormal behaviour brought on by overcrowding, in which case it would not have been common at all when humans werer dispersed thinly. Society was to save its members from external threats, and ceases to work when they start killing each other. Companionship, mutual care and protection, and food sharing were its functions, not the opposite. What was the very aim of social living for humans, to the Christian, has to be a revelation from God.
Belief in life after death is a consequence of self awareness. Any animal able to get conscious enough to realize what death means to itself must suffer anguish about it. Yet to come to this realization, a lot of observation and swapping of ideas must have been needed, including factors to suggest that life might not necessarily end at death. They saw death in Nature and birth in Nature. Many things, herbaceous plants, died each year and sprouted again the next. They seemed to die but did not. Seeds were cast on to the soil, and went brown. They seemed to die but revived. Even Paul the apostle thought seeds died. Some animals hibernated in winter, they seemed to die but awoke again. Other animals and humans died, but new ones were born. How did that relate to everything they saw around? They observed in Nature regular cycles like the cycle of day and night, and that of the seasons. It all encouraged them to believe that death was not permanent. They decided that all life was born again!
All of this process might well have been going on in the semi-conscious state that early humans were in, so that, when they started to think symbolically, and death was identified symbolically, all of these other implications already came with it. It means that death was hardly ever, if ever, considered as permanent. Indeed, the concept of permanence, of forever and eternity, might have been much more difficult concepts to formulate than that death was automatically followed by rebirth. It is speculative, but not unreasonable. If it is so, the idea of being born again long preceded the notion of religion, and of humanity being indebted to gods. Death and rebirth was as normal for people as for plants. It was how things were. The thought of a life after death might not have been an advanced religious gift, but an early misconception of emerging human consciousness.
Burial
What of burial? Religionists always consider it to be a sign of reverence for life, and so it eventually became, but was it always? If it is a sign of reverence, then squirrels have a reverence for nuts and cats for their excrement. And burial under the earth seems an odd thing for people used to living in light and air to do, given that they were thinking of a rebirth. Not, though, if they were thinking of the stink of decay that accompanies a corpse after a few days. Burial then is quite a matter of fact thing to do.
Humans are social animals. They live together in groups. As hunter gatherers, they lived in seasonal camps convenient to intercept the migrating herds. When someone died, they cannot have just left them in their midst decaying. Even at the most elementary level of consciousness they must have shifted the corpse away from the camp, and they must quickly have caught on to the advantages of burial to rid themselves of the smell, and to avoid attracting scavangers and predators to the camp. Even the neanderthals who preceded Homo sapiens buried their dead with flowers to judge from remains left in the grave. The assumption is that it was a sign of reverence for the dead, but perhaps it was because of the stench, the equivalent of a nosegay. The scent of the flowers hid the stink of the corpse they were moving, and were put in the grave with it. If the use of flowers for this matter of fact reason became associated with burial, it became a custom, and its purpose came to be seen as symbolic of reverence.
Food in graves and the burial of grave goods are better indications of life after death, implying as they did that the dead person might need them for a short while after dying. They perhaps thought that they would be reborn quickly, the food not usually being substantial. There is certainly no implication of an extended period of life after death, unless a bowl of honey and a few barley cakes could last forever. It is unlikely that emergent people had any conception of eternity. It therefore is no support for a primitive revelation of the Christian kind—everlasting life. Immortality and eternity are sophisticated notions which took longer to appear but when they did, along with the realization that we differed from plants and the seasonal cycles, they were applied to the afterlife and became the supernatural gift of the major religions.
It is a mistake to suppose that the hope of immortality after death was first revealed to mankind by the founders of the great historical religions, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. To all appearances, it was cherished by men all over the world thousands of years before Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed were born.Sir James Frazer, The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion
Yet, Zwemer argues that evidence of belief in an afterlife and the fancy that hope and faith accompanied it, and a concomitant belief in a tribal father or a high god is “psychologically” indistinguishable from the revelation of God to Adam in Genesis. Again it shows the serious lack of reason that even Christian professors make no attempt to hide. These symptoms are indeed psychologically indistinguishable from the lessons of Genesis, but the Christians cannot comprehend that Genesis is a myth written in explanation of human behaviour at a time when people were satisfied that a super being called God served as an explanation, and they had nothing better. There is no possibility that the myth is correct and the science wrong. It would go against an accumulation of evidence from many fields of study showing the myths are wrong and science is right. Science also demonstrates why it is right by testing but myth requires unquestioning acceptance, just like Christianity.
Zwemer is a professor of Christian missions, among other things, and much of his evidence comes from Christian missionaries. Does anyone seriously think that Christian missionaries can be objective? Can they objectively study the native habits of stone age people when their whole mission is to bring them to Christianity? Most of the people cited enthusastically by Zwemer are forgotten. Their data are deeply flawed. It is flawed because the Christian cannot cease to be an apologist for their religion, and everything they write is stained by their own belief. It is, in a word, useless.
Here is the central flaw complete. Zwemer cites R P M Briault, a Roman Catholic missonary in west Africa. He says the religion of primitive Negro tribes have always had five elements all of which are impossible to explain without accepting the fact that “God has spoken” (Heb 1:1):
- Organized family life
- A named supreme but unseen power
- A moral sense
- An undying soul
- Prayer and sacrifice.
We are invited to accept that these five are impossible to explain without God! You just have to shake your head in astonishment that, for Christians, God, a concept even they cannot explain, and for which scientists can find not a shred of evidence, explains anything. Consider sacrifice. Does God need sacrifice? If He does, does it include human sacrifice? Was the crucifixion of Christ a human sacrifice? Did God reveal to Adam that human sacrifice was necessary to atone for his sins? So, did God’s revelation actually lead to the cruel death of countless numbers of innocent human beings? Or is it all just baloney?
Nothing in all of this is inexplicable. It is explained simply by the conscious evolution and the social nature of humanity. The failure to appreciate this illustrates the demonic character of religion. It utterly destroys the factor that makes humanity what it is—reason. If reason is what the bible means by free will then Christianity defies God who allegedly made people with free will, so it must be demonic, for the demonic powers are those that defy God, Christians say. If reason is not free will, then what is it? Without free will one is not free to reason.
Schmidt tells us that primitive tribesmen themselves did not devise religion but it came down to them from their ancestors by word of mouth. So, who initiated this oral tradition? Native people usually make it their mythical tribal founder or creator, the personification of the tribal totem power. It is a local, a tribal founder, but Schmidt thinks it was God creating man, then introducing Himself to His favourite creation.
The Judaeo-Christian God is always pure and good, and so too are the tribal fathers, but could anyone devise for themselves a founder who was morally wicked and a social liability? No social group with such a monstrous god could survive. Why would anyone want to live in a tribe with ideals that were malevolent and immoral, and the tribe utterly unpleasant and unsafe to live in? They would leave to form a tribe with an acceptable, benevolent god, or they would revolt against the wicked god, doubtless guided by prophets who knew of a benevolent one, and would set up the new good god in place of the wicked one.
The idea that Judaeo-Christianity has the only good god is absurd and laughable. Everyone wants one because the tribal god represents the ideals of the tribe, and the tribe is the guarantee of security for its members. That is why tribes so often have the idea of a golden age when they were founded by their founder or creator. The tribe was set up with the ideals established by the founder, and thereafter it had to live up to those ideals—the morals and culture of the tribe, at base, descriptions of socially necessary instincts[†]Moral The word is from the Latin, mos, mores which means “typical or proper behaviour of human beings in society”, nothing on the face of it to do with God but entirely concerning social behaviour and manners.. But individual members of the tribe are not perfect, and some will always seek to gain an advantage over others, by circumscribing tribal tradition if necessary. Jews and Christians call them sinners. If there were no social sanctions on those who would defy tribal morality for individual gain, then the tribe would become a free for all and would fall apart. It would offer no security for the members ready to accept the rules.
No tribe as a whole could live up to the ideal because we are not genetically identical. The nature of genetics is that everyone is different, and some people will always have a combination of genes in which important ones might be weak or absent, like the instincts to behave socially. Then, because we are conscious, thinking animals, they might scheme to get the upper hand, defy the rules, and become a tyrant or grasp the common, sacred possessions of the tribe for themselves. The “Fall” is virtually a necessity of humans having imperfect moral instincts. Thus they have, as conscious social animals, to verbalize their standards as laws and morals.
What is comical is that Schmidt thinks holiness, which is perfect moral goodness, is inconceivable and impossible without an original holy being, a prefectly moral being to get it from! It is like saying an original flying horse with wings must have appeared to human beings for them to conceive the idea of Pegasus. People could see horses that could carry a man but not fly, and birds that could not carry a man but had wings and so could fly. Putting the two together might have been a great gestalt moment but it was entirely human and needed no primitive revelation of a flying horse.
The same is true of holiness or perfect morality. To postulate God as necessary for humans to conceive it is to neglect the conscious creativity that makes us what we are. Even in the Judaeo-Christian tradition it is demeaning, both of humanity and of God, for God allegedly made us in His image. Does it not mean that we were bijou gods ourselves? To create the world, God is creative, and so we, made in His image, must be creative too, and we obviously are, so why do these religious bigots think God needed a primitive revelation?
Without any thought needed, from instinct based in the social nature of their biology, the primordial tribe had evolved certain traditions, and when they began to think about them, they formulated their culture and morals. No one was individually perfect, but in the course of time they conceived of a perfectly moral being—a holy being! No actual holy being was necessary, and it seems superfluous to have to say so, but it is necessary because minds have been destroyed by the gnawing maggots of religious dogma.
What Schmidt is doing is projecting his Christianity on to the primitive people he purports to be studying. He says natural causes cannot explain how all primitive people have these variations of Christian belief at their root. It is, he says, a universal belief that God created the world and gave it its purpose—to serve man, and for man to offer first fruits to Him but let the priests eat them because He was too busy to dine. Even so, He would welcome them all to join Him in eternity. These primitives already believe in the One True God, and have no real need to switch to belief in Christianity, a degenerate cult that has put new conditions on God’s accepting them into heaven. The primitives mainly felt sure of salvation and had no worry about hell fire until the missionaries gave them it, with the conversion package. Then the ancient tribal society fell apart, its cultural cement destroyed.
Who are the savages? Who are the devils? They are the supposed Christian anthropologists and missionaries who destroy the mental comfort of mind that primitive culture offered. No wonder the outcome is all too often social and personal degeneration, despair and drunkenness. If these bigots were so sure these simple societies had had a primitive revelation, it would have been more saintly to have left them to it, letting God continue to reveal Himself to them as He felt necessary, rather than spreading their own inconsistent and monstrous elaborations of it that they have no idea are not devilish elaborations that God despairs about. They never consider that. For them, it shows a lack of faith. Yet they say God gave us reason.
Paradoxically, Zwemer ends his book with a citation from Schleiter that utterly destroys Schmidt’s silly generalizing from the murky observations of Christian missionaries:
The entire attempt to formulate universal laws upon the basis of the intensive study of a very limited group of cultural facts literally bristles with fallacies and insupportable presuppositions…
Schleiter, along with Zwemer, Schmidt, and the rest, does not seem to think a primitive revelation is an example of the “universal laws” to which he refers, and the evidence for it, apart from Genesis 3, is precisely “a limited group of cultural facts”, namely those picked out by Schmidt as supporting the thesis. Schleiter is criticising the evolutionary hypothesis but as usual cannot see that his criticisms apply better to the Christian distortions they consider to be anthropology. The attempt to frame hypotheses from tribes supposed to be “the most primitive, and therefore to constitute the elementary stage in the process of development”, as he goes on to say, is just what Schmidt does to get what he thinks is closest to the primitive revelation, and he repeatedly uses this alleged criterion to discount cases that do not fit his theory—they are not old enough and so have degenerated from the purity of the original. It is supposed to be the evolutionists who do it and whom Schleiter is fingering, but the evolutionists are too well aware that the adjective “primitive” applied to modern tribes, however backward we think they are, does not make them the immediate sons and daughters of the first humans:
The specific people have not wilfully contrived to remain in statu quo, in a crysalis stage, for untold ages, and so provide the convenient basis for speculative reconstructions…Schlieter
That is what the evolutionists know. These modern stone age people are modern people a long way removed from emergent humanity. The criticism is directed at Tylor and Frazer but applies more surely to Schmidt. The successors of Tylor and Frazer, following scientific principles, realized their faults and sought to correct them, moving on to sounder methods. It is how science progresses. Revelations cannot progress, they can only regress, to degenerate according to the theory of the Christian scholars, except that Christianity does not regress. It only progresses, despite being a revelation. It defies their own theory—a continuous miracle!
Further Reading
- The article on Zwemer continued…
- More on religious origins
- More on culture and resources
- More on the death of God and secular Christianity
