(From Occult Invasion, Harvest House, 1998)

The picture being painted for us of the idyllic life of perfect harmony with nature and with one another supposedly lived by indigenous peoples before the evil white man came along is not true. Concerned by such lies, Jungleman, once a powerful shaman of the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon, told the bitter truth about the lives of indigenous peoples in Spirit of the Rainforest. It is a tale of continual sexual perversion and abuse, warmongering, brutality, living in terror of human and spirit enemies; of curses, suffering, and death. It is a story, too, of deliverance through Jesus Christ into a whole new life of peace and joy and hope for eternity.

There is a chasm of morality between animals and man which cannot be bridged by any natural process. Historian/philosopher Herbert Schlossberg reminds us: "Animals do not act morally or immorally; they only act naturally. A system of ethics that says human beings ought to base their behavior on nature therefore justifies any behavior, because nature knows no ethic."¹ In full agreement, Nobelist Sir John Eccles points out that any nature religion must of necessity be amoral:

The current simplistic "black is good, white is bad" attitude in the West partakes of a similar fashionable blindness. It denies the biblical teaching that there is no difference between the races—that all are sinners equally in need of salvation. The media continually emphasizes that the great conflict is black against white and that it is primarily the fault of the whites because blacks always lived in peace until the white man arrived on the scene. The truth, however, is that blacks fought and killed and enslaved and tortured blacks in Africa before the white man came along—and are doing so today.

It was the Muslims (Arabs) who were the first suppliers of slaves (from their well-supplied warehouses on the West African coast) to Europe and America. Moreover, it was the blacks themselves who captured and sold their own people—from other tribes, of course. All through Africa the tribes had their territories and fought their wars, as they do even today. Actually there was more peace in Africa, as distasteful as that fact may be for Africans to swallow, when the colonialists were in control than there was before or has been since the Africans have achieved independence. Lack of space prevents the enumeration of the conflicts of centuries between the many native tribes in Africa. The example of only two of those tribes must suffice.

The Hutus and Tutsis have been killing one another for 400 years. The Hutus were the first to populate the area now known as Rwanda and Burundi, preceding the Tutsis by about 500 years. They were farmers. The Tutsis, who raised cattle, were the ethnic minority but held a higher place in the occupational hierarchy and had more wealth and received preferential treatment by the colonialists. As an aftermath of the Hutu riots in 1959, however, the Belgians ceded Rwanda to the Hutus, who immediately massacred Tutsis by the tens of thousands. In Burundi the Tutsis gained control and proceeded to slaughter Hutus. The present bloodbath began in 1994:

In a worst-case scenario, the very heart of Africa could implode, sucking the 30 million people in the region... into a vortex of violence.³

God declares that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). It is dishonest to treat native cultures as though they were immune to that indictment. Consider two young sisters, survivors of Oatman’s wagon massacre in 1851. Their captivity by Apaches and sale into slavery to another tribe is recounted in agonizing detail. The two girls spent some years with their Native American captors performing slave labor. The younger sister died from starvation. Most interesting was the reaction of the girls’ fellow "slaves" (the Indian squaws). Great was the women’s amazement when they learned how civilly the white man lived with his wife. They expressed the vain hope that they might escape and join so kindly a society.⁴

Or who could forget the cruel massacre at the Marcus Whitman Mission in the State of Washington? Entirely unprovoked, it reflected the Indians’ tragic superstition that the god of these gentle missionaries had malevolently caused the deaths of some of their people. Indigenous peoples are as fallen and as prone to sin as are the rest of mankind. We cannot honestly sanitize any segment of society in our fallen world.

Margaret Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa sold millions of copies in numerous languages, was the recognized standard in anthropology for decades, and provided a key "scientific" justification for the sexual revolution which is still perverting today’s world and much of the church. The book, however, was a fraud put forth to justify her own adultery and lesbianism. More recent research in Samoa has shown that Mead’s representation of an idyllic native society unspoiled by sexual restrictions was totally false. The facts about Samoan life are exactly the opposite, yet the lie continues to provide "scientific" excuse for immorality worldwide.

In the Hawaiian Islands a revival of native religion, hailed as the recovery of lost tradition, has brought into the open witchcraft practices that survived in secret under a thin veneer of professed Christianity. One follower of native Hawaiian religion, who had been responding openly in an interview, suddenly clammed up when asked about the current use of "evil spells." After a long, uncomfortable pause, the one being interviewed exclaimed:

Notes:

1. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson, 1983), p. 171.

2. Sir John Eccles and Daniel N. Robinson, The Wonder of Being Human—Our Brain and Our Mind (New Science Library, 1985), p. 61.

3. Barbara Slavin, "Ancient cycle of vengeance and violence: African crisis born of centuries of ethnic passions." In USA Today, November 12, 1996, p. 10A.

4. R. B. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls (University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

5. Tamara Jones, "Fire Goddess Defended: Harnessing of Volcano is Hot Hawaii Issue, " in Los Angeles Times, February 9, 1988, Part I, pp. 1, 18.