The Australian Aboriginal
by
Ken Ham
One very old tribal
Aboriginal from north Queensland who had become a Christian, recalled for
me a conversation he had with his father when only a young boy. He asked,
‘What is God like?’ his father replied, ‘I don’t know
— we have forgotten.’
When Captain Cook arrived
in Australia some 200 years ago, he encountered a dark-skinned race of nomadic
people with a stone age culture. Evolutionists say these Aborigines came to
Australia at least 40,000 years ago from unknown origins. The evolutionary
view which is taught in schools and promoted in the media is really saying
these were a people who hadn’t evolved as fast as other types of man.
Because of this, most people including many white Christians, regard the Aborigines
as primitive. expecially in the sense of being not as good as the Europeans.
It is little wonder there is racial discrimination when people’s minds
are pervaded by such a false view of aboriginal history.
BUT WHAT IS A TRUE VIEW OF THEIR
HISTORY?
According to the book
of Genesis. God created only two people (Adam and Eve) whom He told to be
‘fruitful and multiply’. This event took place around 6000 years
ago. This couple were the original and only ancestors of all humans who have
ever lived. In fact we are told that the woman was called Eve because she
was to be the mother of all living. Genesis chapter 5 informs us that Adam
and Eve had many sons and daughters. After this presumably their sons married
sisters (or perhaps nieces). In the early days of man the children from the
union of a brother and sister would not have been deformed as often happens
today, since Adam and Eve were physically perfect in every way. It was only
after the fall of man, when sin entered the world and God therefore placed
a curse upon it, that everything started to degenerate. As time proceeded
man's body suffered more and more from the effects of the curse, until the
time came that God forbade the marrying of brother and sister, since their
offspring were now likely to be deformed. (The more closely related you are
to someone the more defects you have in common, which may show in your offspring).
The laws of incest were not given until the time of Moses. Abraham, for example,
was married to his half sister.
For about two thousand
years after Adam and Eve, people multiplied on the earth. They also increased
in violence and evil and the Bible records that God saw that ‘the wickedness
of man was very great’. Only one man sought to please God — Noah.
Noah was commanded to build a large boat to carry representatives of every
kind of animal as well as food, and his family. All people on the earth except
Noah and his family were drowned by the world wide flood God sent upon the
earth as a judgment. After the flood, only one family of eight people remained.
These were the ancestors of all races today. God commanded the descendants
of Noah to move out over the earth. They refused, and instead, congregated
together to build a tower — the tower of Babel, about 4,000 years ago.
God became very angry at this, so He confused their language and forced them
to move apart. Different languages resulted. One nation and culture was split
into many groups. People with similar language would have moved together to
various parts of the earth. Soon after this the world would have been populated
by groups which spoke different languages and lived in different places. These
would eventually produce different cultures. Because of the different climatic
conditions, the variations of skin colour, etc., among people, the isolation
and inbreeding of different groups of people, differing races of man with
minor variations of skin colour, eye shape, etc., came into being. New nations
were being born.
We can say in summary
that:
All people of the
world today have their ancestry in a man called Noah, and further back to
Adam, whether they be the Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, or
the Eskimos.
The differing cultures
separated by different languages have only arisen since the time of the
Tower of Babel. The physical differences between the races (e.g. skin colour,
eye shape) are only minor.
In the mythology
and legends from cultures around the world, you would expect to find their
ancestry in Noah reflected in their stories about a world flood, or how
man was created, etc.
The above account is totally
different to that told normally through the media or school textbooks. We
are told that as man evolved so did his culture. He first learnt to use stone
tools, then developed the bronze age, and so on until he arrived at where
he is today. On this basis, the obvious implication about different cultures
throughout the world is that some have not evolved far at all.
Now let us apply a Biblical
perspective on history to the Australian Aborigines (hopefully with sensitivity).
Their ancestor Noah had the knowledge of the true God. He also had ship building
technology, farming ability, knew how to work alloys, etc. Remnants of this
true knowledge of God, of creation and of Noah, can still be seen in their
mythology. e.g. they have many legends of a world wide flood. All of which
means that somewhere in their history, this knowledge has been forgotten,
lost, or deliberately discarded. The culture Captain Cook discovered was spiritist.
They did not have the knowledge of the true God and only had a ‘stone
age’ culture.
WHAT THEN HAS HAPPENED?
Someone, somewhere in
their history, has turned away from the true God, devised their own religion
and successfully persuaded their fellow Aborigines to accept it. They have
suffered the consequences of this. Instead of being a culture regenerated
by God’s standards, they have degenerated from them. Now, before you
start shouting racist, take into consideration the fact that the European
culture in Australia is little different. Despite its background of Christianised
history, it has turned its back on God and is increasingly an anti-God degenerate
culture. Many Australians can’t see it because they have become immune.
White people point to natives who have been head hunters known to cut people
up and eat them while the victim was still alive to see it. Such people they
label as primitive savages. The white society forgets that it also cuts people
up alive, millions of them, but it's called abortion and legalised.
Societies get this way,
because they turn their back on God and degenerate away from His standards.
They no longer have a respect for the life of man made in the image of God,
because they no longer respect God. The apostle Paul wrote to the church at
Rome that when people turn their back on the Creator God, or deliberately
leave Him out of their knowledge, God turns them over to foolish and perverse
ways.
When cannibals turn back
to God, they stop their perversions as they come to Christ. They have no option
but to leave their old culture behind and conform their way of living to that
which is acceptable to God.
Whenever people from a
European culture become Christians, they must turn away from their culture’s
worship of material greed and power with its basis in evolutionary immorality
and its anti-God degenerative activities. Similarly when aborigines become
Christians they must also separate themselves from any anti-God culture.
Christians of all races
are not to live under the influence of the culture they have come from, but
rather they are to influence it for good, because they are to influence it
for God.
A Christian Aborigine
from Western Australia said, ‘Much of the land rights arguments are
a reversal of the dominion God gave to man. if we want land rights because
of sacred sites, sacred kangaroos, etc., then the land and animals have
dominion over us. God made it the opposite to this.’
LAND RIGHTS
There has been much discussion
in Australia recently on the issue of land rights for Aborigines (and many
demonstrations as well). Several senators, as well as many others, use as
the basis for their arguments for land rights for the aborigines, their belief
that the Aborigines have been in Australia for 40,000 years. How is anyone
to know what to think about land rights? It should be obvious that unless
you have a correct view of the Aborigines’ history — you will be
unlikely to have a correct view about land rights.2
For instance, on the basis
of a literal Biblical view of world history, aborigines have been in Australia
less than 4,000* years (not 40,000). Many want land rights so that Aboriginal
sacred or religious sites can be kept. Is this valid? Again, before we can
decide, we must have a correct view of why they want sacred sites preserved.
Is it that they want to preserve all things associated with their religion?
If this is the case then to understand their religion, you have to understand
their true history. Isn't their religion anti-God? Shouldn’t Christians
rather be telling the aborigines they need to turn to the true God of history
and turn their back on pagan worship?
A Christian aborigine
from Western Australia said ‘much of the land rights arguments are a
reversal of the dominion God made to man. If we want land rights because of
sacred sites, sacred kangaroos, etc., then the land and animals have dominion
over man. God made it the opposite to this.’ The aboriginal knowledge
of their own history is only vaguely preserved in their dreamtime legends,
a mixture of fact and fiction, but which never the less still tells them man
was created. Evolution destroys this dreamtime story and removes from their
society any basis it had whatsoever.
If evolution is adopted
by the aboriginals it will destroy their culture totally, but in doing so
it will create an intense racial problem between the blacks and whites of
Australia as they vie in a struggle for the survival of the fittest, free
from any real morality or possible respect for each other based on the fact
man is made in God’s image.
The harsh reality which
faces people from all cultures is simply this: man must serve the God who
made Him and reject any culture as degenerate which does not have this basis.
CREATION EVANGELISM AND ABORIGINES
There is a tremendous
response from aboriginal students in schools when they are told of their rightful
place in history; when they are shown that their own cultural legends indicate
they have a common ancestry with Europeans in Noah and they are not primitive,
lesser beings. Their culture has many stories about the creation of man after
the animals and woman after man. They need to know they have a common ancestry
with all mankind in the first man Adam, and more importantly, because of this
they, like all men, need to accept the salvation offered by the last Adam
who is Jesus Christ. Only this frees men of all races from hatred, from greed
and from every other evil which destroys man and nation alike.
*This is calculated assuming
a literal reading of the Biblical Geneologies, without any gaps in the chronology,
and this assumption is justified.
1. The concept of ‘land
rights’ (or ownership of land) is not known in traditional Aboriginal
culture. It is a terminology introduced from European materialistic culture
and imposed upon the Aborigines.
