THE DARWIN PAPERS

VOLUME 1                                                                                NUMBER XI

From The Nebulous Hypothesis:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of
Darwinian Theory © 1996
Editor and Publisher James M. Foard

ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

The Darwin Papers may be freely
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provided acknowledgment is made
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The Darwin Papers © 2000 James M. Foard
© 2004 James Foard
Read how "Mythbusters" stumbles over
ancient batteries found in the middle east

Read about the important differences
between Christ and Buddha Here 

These were the families of the sons of Noah, according to their generations, in their nations, and from these the nations were divided on the earth after the flood.                                             Genesis 10:32

 

We have also read in the previous chapters that Darwin had absolutely no evidence, by his own admission, to support his claims that men had descended from apes, and since his time there has been no truly reliable evidence of man's descent from any ape or ape-like creature. If the story that we are told by evolutionists and modern archaeologists is not the true story of man's origin, then is there another, untold history of man, a much more fascinating, richer, grander picture of man's history?

Evolutionists would have us believe that all ancient human civilization gradually developed from simple, backwards, ignorant cultures into more complex ones, but is there other evidence to support the notion that man was created with an astonishing high intellect from the very beginning, and could the sites where early, primitive remnants of migrating hunter-gatherer societies are found not necessarily be the original sites of human occupation on this planet, but only indications of small wandering populations of settlers, exploring parties re-populating the earth after some world-wide, cataclysmic disaster had destroyed a previously highly advanced civilization that had spread to the ends of the earth? Were these primitive sites merely the farthest outposts of colonizing expeditions setting out from early centers of civilization after the Flood of Noah, and not mere brute savages with little intellect separated from our own world by vast periods of time during which evolution supposedly occurred?

Let is take a fresh look at mankind's history; fresh that is compared to the standard, dry, lifeless evolutionary story, and yet at the same time it is an ancient perspective, free of the evolutionist bias, and see what the story would look like from the perspective of the most ancient historical source available, the book of Genesis in the Bible, corroborated by the Jewish historian of the first century A.D., Josephus, in his history of mankind, and from other ancient writings.

And the sons of Noah moved over the face of the earth after the Flood, and the descendants of Ham migrated to the east and to the south, and populated Africa, and India, and China, and the islands in the far east that were in the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. And the descendants of Japeth migrated to the west and to the north, and populated Europe, and the isles to the north, and their descendants the scythians populated what became known as the land of Russ, and Siberia, and the lands of the north. And as men traveled they hunted game and gathered of the fruit of the land, and as they settled in different areas they learned to farm, and they began to grow crops, and raised cattle and sheep, and they bartered and traded, and from these small communities there grew cities, and they set down rules of government, and they established laws in order to protect the weak from the strong, and to protect the rights of individuals from the state, and to protect the community from those who would attempt to rise up and usurp the social order for their own selfish ends, so that men might co-exist together in peace, and in harmony, and so that all might have their rights protected and also so that the poor, the aged, the widow, the orphan, the weak and helpless and the stranger might have their needs fulfilled in a just and equitable manner.

And even though men forgot the original revelation given to their father Noah, they still retained much of the wisdom from the past, and from the civilization before the Flood, and the "light that lights every man who comes into the world" still gave men understanding of many of the mysteries of creation, and the image of God, even though corrupted by sin, was still imprinted on the human soul. And men still retained the knowledge of natural law that God had implemented into the creation, and in the east, in the land of Jung Gwo, the Central Country, they called this natural law, and the Way of this law, the Dao, or The Way of Heaven. And men learned how to live according to this natural law, and some who ordered their lives according to it lived to great ages, and they accumulated much knowledge. And there were wise men who kept the wisdom that was handed down to them through the generations from the time of Noah. And the Yellow Emperor was learned in much of this wisdom, and he became the father of Chinese medicine, and taught them of herbs, and of healing, and of the way to balance the forces within the human body so that men might enjoy good health, and live long and fruitful lives.

And in the land of India their sages delved into the mysteries of creation, and sought wisdom, and they recorded this wisdom in their ancient Vedas and Upanishads, and they learned much of God's moral law for human conduct, and their sages called this law Dharma, and they taught this law to their children, and it was a good law in the beginning, and a noble law, but being removed over the years from the Revelation of their father Noah, they lost site of the original purpose of this law, which was to honor God, and to bring man into fellowship with God, and to help their fellow man, and they became enamored of temple rites, and ceremonies that God had not instituted, and they began to worship false gods, gods who had not made the heavens and the earth, and they bowed down to idols made of wood, and metal and stone, the work of men's hands, and as they lost the knowledge of the true God whom Noah, their father had worshiped, the caste system that their ancestors originally established for the division of labor for men to cooperate together, became an ancestral yoke preventing certain classes from enjoying equal rights in society, and from prospering, and the law which was originally meant for man's weal became a vehicle for the enrichment of a few at the expense of the many.

As it is written in the Mahabharata A:"'Tapa is innocent, study is harmless, the ordinance of the Vedas prescribed for all the tribes are harmless, the acquisition of wealth by exertion is harmless; but when they are abused in their practices it is then that they become sources of evil.'" [Sudras should have the same rights and opportunities afforded to every other caste, and there is much Christian missionary work being done now in India to relieve the suffering of this oppressed group]

And in Egypt they retained much of the science from the antediluvian civilization, and they knew of the structure and properties of physical objects, and they retained mathematical and chemical formulas, and they were able to scan the cosmos, and learned astronomy, and studied the motion of the earth, and they built great edifices according to the alignment of the earth and the stars, and they established a great civilization, and ruled over their part of the earth.

And as the sons of Noah re-populated the earth, at first they still had the knowledge of the one God who had warned Noah about the Flood, and had protected him and his family so that the seed of man and of every other animal might be preserved to replenish the earth. But as men wandered over the face of the earth, gradually their understanding of God, and of His righteous judgments and statutes was forgotten, and men ascribed to nature the wondrous works of the Creator, and they ceased to be thankful, and to worship God, and they began to live for themselves, and to fulfill their own lusts, and the strong began to oppress the weak, and the rich began to take advantage of the poor, and they began to practice abominable rites, and to commit lewdness and to worship false gods, and demons, and to communicate with spirits of fallen angels, and to attempt to communicate with the dead, and God's commandment to care for the helpless and the fatherless was forgotten as mankind forgot that all men were created in the image of God, and were loved by Him, and that men should respect the rights of others whom God had created.

And God decided that he would choose one nation through whom He would reveal His Law, the Torah, to the entire human race, and He chose a man to whom He would reveal Himself, through whose seed He would establish this nation, and through this man's seed all the nation's of the earth would eventually be blessed, for through this man's seed would come not only the Law, but there would also come Him who had been promised, a Redeemer, who would lift the curse from off of mankind that had fallen on them since the father and mother of all mankind had fallen into sin.

Over 140 different ancient cultures on the face of the earth have a "Flood Legend," from the legends of Gilgamesh among the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, to the legends of the lost continent of Atlantis among the Greeks, as well as among the Indians and Chinese in their Flood legends, and yet they are unconnected to each other historically, in other words, the only possible explanation for the transmission of these legends would be from one generation to the next going back to the actual eye-witnesses of the event. The Greek philosopher Plato recorded the existence and submersion of the former, great continent of Atlantis as fact.

The ancient Chinese had stories of the Flood recorded in their earliest encyclopedia, which dates many hundreds of years before Christ. In the stories passed down among various Indian tribes of North and South America, all the way from the Alaskan Algonquin Indians on down through the Hopi to the Meso-American Indians with their classic Popul Vuh and the mythical land of Azatlan (quite similar in pronunciation to Atlantis), we find Flood legends. The Pima Indians of southwest Arizona have a legend of their founding father who climbed a mountain to escape a great Flood, and then descended the mountain to found the tribe.

The beginning of Mayan history, according to their calender, began in 3135 B.C., approximately the same time that ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Hindu and Sumerian civilizations began. A. Hyatt Verrill wrote: "In this connection it is of interest to note that according to their traditions the Mayas were descendants of the four 'Becabs' who came over seas to escape the Flood, and that Biblical students estimate that the Flood described in the Bible was about 3000 B.C." (1)

The Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh contains an account of the Flood, as do ancient Akkadian and Babylonian legends, but the most accurate and consistent record is found in the Bible, since where other accounts differ with each other they all have more commonalities with the Biblical version, thus establishing it as the purest and most authentic version.

In tracing the migrating patterns of the earliest settlers of ancient civilizations, we find a remarkable consistency. The people who settled in Europe migrated North and West from somewhere in the Middle East. The African tribes gradually migrated South, from Northern Africa into Southern Africa. The earliest known advanced Hindu culture, the Harappan culture of the Indus valley, appeared sometime around 2300 B.C. in the Northwest area of the subcontinent of India, having migrated there from the North and West, i.e. from the Middle East. The people of China, Korea, Southern Asia and Mongolia migrated East from an original starting point in the West. The Indians of North America were supposed to have come from Asia.

Thus we find a migrating pattern among all ancient people that can be traced back to roughly the Eastern Mediterranean area, the same area where the Mountains of Ararat rise up above the plains in Turkey, where the ship of Noah was supposed to have finally come to rest after the Flood!

The ancient Aztec calender stone of Tenochtitlan contains their history of the human race as well as prophecies of the future end of this age. It reveals that the previous sun (age of the world) was destroyed by a Flood and that a man and woman survived to repopulate the earth. Interestingly enough, the prophecy on the stone revealing how the present age, known as Olin-Tonatiah, will end predicts that it will be destroyed by a great earthquake and movement of the earth, which is remarkable, as the book of Revelation also indicates that the last days of our present age will be characterized by a great earthquake, with the earth being jarred out of her present rotational position in orbit: "And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood (great atmospheric disturbances); And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth (so it would appear from the earth if she was shaken from her present axis of rotation), even as a fig tree tosses her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places." (2) (This refers to the end of our present age, however the ultimate end of the world, according to the Bible, will be by fire, J.M.F)

The Egyptian civilization appeared full blown with a highly advanced culture at the very beginning of it's existence and experienced a gradual decline in knowledge and culture over the centuries, causing John Anthony West to write, "Egyptian civilization was not a "development," it was a legacy...[from a previous extinct civilization]" (3).

The earliest pyramids of Egypt, those grand and magnificent structures, were much more architecturally complex than the later ones, and even modern engineers marvel at how 6.5 million tons of stone were quarried from far off sites and then fitted together so perfectly in the great Pyramid of Giza with such exact precision that it was found difficult to slip a piece of paper between parts of adjoining stones from the remaining limestone casing.

Evolutionists have given us extremely easy answers to very difficult questions in their simplistic scenarios of how these great pyramids were built. Although there were a few primitive pyramids that some archaeologists claim were built before the more advanced ones, there is a vast amount of difference between these few primitive ones and the three major pyramids.

What we do find are amazing astronomical alignments built right into the very structures themselves. Mathematicians have determined that this pyramid was extremely well planned out with it's height ratio to it's ground circumference, while the sides and corners of the base of the pyramid had only a 12" margin of error.

Some modern archaeologists have tried to simplify this feat, attempting to claim that perhaps the builders measured out the ground plans for the pyramid using a rolling type of measuring device, so that it had to come out to such a degree of accuracy, however this does not reduce one bit the incredible amount of planning, cutting, and measuring to place the blocks into position, nor does it explain a shaft that runs straight through millions of tons of stone within the pyramid that apparently had remarkable astronomical alignment with certain constellations. 

This shaft had to have been planned and precisely cut into the stones before the pyramid was ever built. To quarry and fit the vast number of stones together to such a degree of accuracy in the Great Pyramid required an extremely advanced knowledge of mathematics and architecture. Even with all of our modern technology today, it would be an enormous feat for modern engineers to build anything like the Great Pyramid. Agatharcides, a Greek writer of the second century A.D., wrote of a smaller pyramid located at the apex of the main one. It was 1/176 the size of the larger one. Multiplying the height of the smaller one by the entire height of the structure, and then multiplying the result by 100,000 gave the astonishing figure of 131,383,296 feet-the exact circumference of the earth!

Archaeologists have told us that these pyramids were built about 2500 B.C., and yet Egyptian civilization only dates back to roughly 3000 B.C. We are supposed to believe that within a few centuries these people went from being neolithic "hunter-gatherer" stone age dwellers to an advanced civilization accomplishing archaeological feats that astonish our civilization today!

Advanced mathematical formulas and equations are found to have pre-dated any of the civilizations of history. The geometry attributed to Euclid and Pythagoras was not actually invented by them (there were already many different ways to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle, the Babylonians knew of quite a few different proofs for this a thousand years before the Greek mathematicians), (4) they stated that they merely collected and organized what had already been known by the ancients.

In a short biographical note on the life of Euclid in the Great Books of the Western World series, the editors state, "It was recognized in antiquity that Euclid had drawn upon all his predecessors. According to Proclus, he 'collected many of the theorems of Eudoxus, perfected many of those of Teatetus, and also brought to incontrovertible demonstration the things which were only loosely proved by his predecessors." (5)

In other words, Euclid took an already existing science of mathematics, the source of which evolutionary archaeologists have no explanation for, then systematized and organized it, proving many things that were already commonly accepted and known in practical use among mathematical scholars. These scientific theorems were not in the least bit "primitive"; the complex geometric formulas demonstrated by Archimedes a couple of hundred years before Christ attest to the very advanced mathematical knowledge of the ancients; our current sciences of engineering and mathematics are based on the proofs and deductions of these ancient civilizations, yet there is no evidence as to where they attained such a high degree of knowledge except that it was a heritage from a previously highly advanced culture, and not from the traditional evolutionary scenario of a bunch of wild, ragged neolithic "cave-men" who suddenly decided to settle down in one spot and start working on complex algebra while they built immense, architecturally perfect pyramids.

The Bible indicates that before the world-wide Flood of Noah the earth had a different atmosphere and hydrospheric conditions, the "waters above the firmament" were possibly a vapor canopy surrounding our present ocean of air, with a thicker ozone layer as well, thus creating a world-wide green-house effect by diffusing the suns rays to all parts of the globe and capturing more heat, creating a world-wide warm and moderate climate around the earth. There were no deserts or polar regions as we know them today, the entire earth was a semi-tropical paradise, and as the atmosphere was probably richer and more abundant in oxygen then, men and animals lived to much greater life spans. As mentioned previously, all paleontologists are nearly universally agreed that this was the case during the age of the dinosaurs and during the age of early man as well, and they have no explanation as to why weather conditions suddenly became much more severe in recent times. We have also seen that the dating techniques to push the age of the dinosaurs back millions of years in time are faulty, and that it is entirely possible that men and dinosaurs lived contemporaneously before and for a short time after the Flood.

The tilt of the earth on it's axis might have increased at the time of the Flood, perhaps brought on by a meteorite impact (or a large stellar body passing near to the earth) already discussed in Chapter Seven. The Bible mentions that God spoke to Noah after he disembarked from off of the ark that the seasons of summer and winter would be more extreme from the time of the Flood onward, when the climate became much more inhospitable. The atmosphere was drastically changed, probably with the loss of the vapor canopy. This is indicated in Genesis where it says that the rainbow would appear in the sky after the Flood as a covenant sign that God would never again bring a flood of waters over the earth, implying that hydrospheric conditions before the Flood were different than those afterwards (not that rainbows did not appear before the Flood, but that the conditions that led to the Flood would never exist again).

After the Flood, with the loss of the world-wide tropical atmosphere and greenhouse effect, there would be a lack of easily obtainable fruit and vegetables, men changed from being vegetarians to meat eaters, probably because of the additional requirement for a greater protein intake to survive in the new world, where a different diet would be necessary to supplant frequently damaged body cells brought on by the harsher living conditions.

Human teeth reveal that in fact our natural diet was one of fruits and vegetables and that meat eating must have been a comparatively recent addition to our diet. From the biological damage caused by increased cosmic and solar radiation as a result of the reduced ozone layer, combined with the other causes, there would have been an increase in the aging processes, men no longer lived to be hundreds of years old.
Animals began to fear man at that time, and as they migrated to different parts of the earth, through natural selection they became adapted to the conditions of the new ecological system. It must be born in mind that this process of natural selection (which Blyth wrote of twenty years before Darwin's Origin and applied to the Biblical principle of creation, not evolution) only produced recognizable varieties within the boundaries of already existing species, there was no process of any new species evolving out of another species, no new kinds of creatures were introduced, only different types within a kind developed through the already existing genetic potential, but this had limits at the species barrier, no reptile became a bird, no ape became a man.

It would seem that if the life span of men before the Flood was much longer, perhaps in the hundreds of years, and that if even for a few centuries after the Flood men still managed to live to ages of three and four hundred years of age, then it would be probable that there would have been a fairly high level of knowledge and technical sophistication of the sciences at that time.
After the Flood, as the former civilization had been destroyed along with the previous world, the first economies of these early survivors would be "hunter gatherer" societies, people would have to start again from scratch, using stone tools and primitive implements to survive. Migration would occur as they began to multiply over the face of the earth again, yet they would still retain much of the great knowledge handed down to them from the antediluvian world, and this is what we find with the pyramids of Egypt, the highly advanced geometric calculations of the ancient Greeks, the complex mathematical and astronomical calculations accomplished by the early Meso-American civilizations, and the sudden appearance of civilizations in China, Sumeria, India and South America testifying to the legacy of a former time of highly advanced culture. All of these early civilizations sprung into existence fully advanced at the beginning of their cultures, only to gradually decline in sophistication and grandeur over centuries of time.

Early Chinese history began in 2697 B.C. during the time of the Yellow Emperor, Huang Ti, yet we find in many treatises, such as The Yellow Emperors Book On Internal Medicine, traditionally ascribed to Huang Ti, an already highly developed science of medicine, along with sophisticated character writing and botany. Modern science is only now beginning to appreciate and incorporate some of this ancient field of medicine, chiefly through the study and practice of acupuncture, as well as in the clinical study and use of plants listed in their ancient herbals.

The earliest examples of Chinese writing are the Oracle Bones from the second millennia B.C.
Imre Galambos wrote: "The inscriptions on these bones tell us that by 1200 BC Chinese writing was already a highly developed writing system which was used to record a language fairly similar to classical Chinese. Such a complex and sophisticated script certainly has a history but so far we found no traces of its predecessors." (Imre Galambos © 2000 Logoi.com)

Since in any botanical study of medicinal properties of plants, probably 99.9% of the plants would be entirely useless for a certain disease, and many plants in the wild are toxic, it would take many hundreds of years of cultural continuity to develop the extensive herbals used in ancient Chinese, Aryuvedic (Hindu), and Aztec medicine, and yet from the earliest times these cultures had extensive and accurate herbal knowledge.

All of the ancient herbalists classed plants according to their medicinal value. According to the Ebers Papyrus, dating from 2,000 years before Christ, there were at one time 2,000 practicing herbal doctors in Egypt to choose from. Dioscorides, a Greek physician of the first century A.D., listed over 500 plants useful for medicinal and aromatic purposes. During the Dark Ages Christian monasteries carried on the tradition and knowledge of herbology, often hand-copying many of the ancient texts. In some of the frontispieces of Bibles from that period we find recorded the names of useful herbs for treating various diseases. Within a century of the invention of movable type in 1453, 32,000 copies of Dioscorides book had been printed. It is well known that the father of patent medicine, Samuel Thomson, was an herbalist and used his knowledge of American Indian herbal cures, along with the traditional ancient Herbals, when he began to select the most useful plant compounds for certain diseases and patented them in 1813. It is his work and that of other herbalists, such as the Christian sect known as the Shakers, who grew and marketed herbs in New York during the early 1800's, that formed the basis of the modern science of pharmacology.

We are finding out that certain Hindu herbs traditionally used for cancer, Boswellia for example, contain unique chemical properties called boswellic acids that have been found useful in the treatment of various forms of carcinomas, and that is just one among thousands of herbs listed in the Hindu herbals used since antiquity. Had modern western medical outlook not been prejudiced by an evolutionary, Euro-centered ethnic bias, medicine might have made much more rapid and richer advancement in the treatment of certain diseases.

The Aztecs were so advanced in their art of medicine that many writers, Soustelle among them, have said that their system of medicine was actually more modern and scientific than that being practiced in Europe at the time of the Conquest. In the sixteenth century, King Phillip ll of Spain sent his personal physician, Francisco Hernandez, to Mexico in 1570 to learn Aztec medicine. After spending seven years there of intense study he compiled an extensive herbal, along with an extensive encyclopedia on their medical knowledge. Portions of his work were eventually published after his death in Italy and in Mexico, though unfortunately many parts were destroyed in a fire. Largely unexplored, this could be a phenomenal area of research. Father Sahagun wrote that they had a large body of written and oral herbal wisdom, knowledge of many minerals used for the curing of illnesses, used anesthetics and set fractures and broken bones, and used a type of bloodstone that stopped hemorrhaging. (6)

The study of language has perplexed scholars for years, since every tribe and culture on the face of the earth, no matter how primitive, have quite intricate, advanced linguistic patterns, showing no evidence of any evolutionary development from a primitive system of guttural growls and grunts, as evolutionists tell us language developed. In fact, certain tribes that live practically in a stone age culture in parts of South America and in Africa have languages that are more complex in many ways than modern English, German, Russian, etc. spoken by more technologically advanced cultures. The ancient Greek language in which much of the early New Testament was written has many more subtle nuances for phrases than some of the modern languages that it has been translated into.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat has written: "Hypothesis about the origin of writing generally postulate an evolution from the concrete to the abstract: an initial pictographic stage that in the course of time and perhaps because of the carelessness of scribes becomes increasingly schematic. The Uruk tablets [some of the earliest forms of writing ever found] contradict this line of thought. Most of the 1,500 signs are totally abstract ideographs; the few pictographs represent such wild animals as the wolf and the fox or items of advanced technology such as the chariot and the sledge. Indeed, the Uruk texts remain largely undeciphered and an enigma to epigraphers." (7)

The ancient Babylonians, a thousand years before Christ, knew of complex angular geometric relationships, they worked extensively with the quadratic equation, cubic relations, advanced algebraic equations, and had knowledge of secant relationships. (8) There is also evidence that they knew of the four major moons of Jupiter, as well as the rings of Saturn, which had not been "re-discovered" until comparatively recent times with the development of the modern telescope.

There is evidence that as recently as the thirteenth century the memory of the former achievements from a forgotten age was still extant. Roger Bacon (1214-1292), a Franciscan monk and scientist wrote what had been thought to be only amazing predictions of modern technological achievements seven centuries ahead of his time, but a careful reading reveals that he was actually writing of what had formerly been accomplished by man: "Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum impetu inaestimabili ["at inestimable speed"], as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device . . ." (9)

The world is literally filled with unmistakable evidence for those who have not been blinded by traditional archaeological theories and have eyes open to see that there was a former highly advanced civilization that produced wonders equal in scope to many of the achievements of modern technology.

Take for example the interlocking metal cogs and wheels forming part of a computerized star planetarium, modern in design and yet over two thousand years old. It was found off of the coast of a Mediterranean island in the spring of 1901 by Greek sponge divers who had run into bad weather and sailed off of their normal course, eventually being forced to cast anchor by the island of Antikythera, located between Greece and the island of Crete. During the course of their diving they discovered the wreckage of an ancient, submerged sailing vessel, with some curious bronze objects in the ships cargo, among which were four pieces of a very sophisticated, bronze differential gear assembly.

Gamma-ray photographs of this mechanism were taken in 1971 to provide more data on the internal construction. In 1974 Professor Derek de Solla Price of Yale University determined that these objects were part of a well designed set of differential gears accurately measuring the cycles corresponding to the lowest common denominator of the orbits of the moon and the sun, which is 235 lunar months. The orbital cycles of the planets could also be calculated on it. This amazing computer-calculator has been dated back to at least 87 B.C. Although some critics such as Steibing (10)have attempted to downplay the importance of this remarkable device as being merely a by-product of Hellenistic science, differential gear assemblies of this caliber were not thought to have even existed until shortly before the eighteenth century. The ability and ingenuity in measuring and casting this instrument required a remarkable degree of technological skill. (11)

Fragments of what are now considered to be ancient electrical batteries were found in 1936 by a German explorer under the sands of Iraq and are now in the Baghdad Museum. The outer casings were made of clay, containing copper rods running through iron cylinders inside the casing, with bitumen on the ends. Although the significance of these devices has been disputed by some modern evolutionists, they do display a great deal of sophistication in their make up, though even if one single unit would not put out a great amount of wattage (although a series of them could if charged), there can be little doubt as to their potential use as genuine batteries, nor do these same critics have any explanation as to why they were built in the manner in which they were.

A recent television program called "Mythbusters" claimed that these couldn't have been batteries because of the low electrical charge the iron cylinders produced. Mythbusters unwittingly made themselves out to be the real mythmakers, since they missed the most obvious and relevant fact concerning batteries in the first place: Batteries by themselves have never been meant to be primary permanent sources of power. They only hold a temporary charge.

When you recharge a battery there has to be some other agent that produces that charge, while batteries themselves are simply used as portable storage facilities for the charge. So, what kind of element in a battery would possibly be the best kind to recharge? Recent experiments in Israel have shown that super oxidized iron has some of the best potential for recharging:

"Iron has possibilities," comments Stanford R. Ovshinsky of the company Energy Conversion Devices in Rochester Hills, Mich. Still, the new technology is "far from being a useful battery," notes Ovshinsky, who invented the metal hydride battery about 20 years ago.
"What [Licht] has done is extremely encouraging," says Digby D. Macdonald of Pennsylvania State University in State College. While the new cathode technology is still at an early stage, he adds, "it's certainly one of the most promising cathodes around." (Science News Online, Week of March 20, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 12 , p. 181)

Even the zinc batteries used in the Mythbusters program modeled after modern batteries would run out of power after a few hours unless they could be recharged. A lead-acid battery in a modern automobile would soon loose it's charge unless there was an alternator to continually recharge it while the engine is running.
Flashlight batteries soon loose their charge, and unless they are nickel-cadmium batteries that can be recharged, they are discarded when their usefulness is over. 

Mythbusters overlooked this simple and obvious fact about batteries in their attempt to show that these ancient relics would have made poor sources of electrical power, unwittingly missing the possibility that at some point these devices would have been charged up by some other primary source of power, and then they were used as portable storage facilities for that power.

Although iron batteries are still in the developmental stage today, and even if the ones found in the middle east had no practical value, they still showed that these ancient people were on the right track concerning electrical power, It is possible that they had some ancient system of charging the devices that we know nothing about today, just as we were ignorant of the science that produced the Antikithera star-computer mechanism. There's an old saying: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it's a duck. These devices were obviously an attempt to construct batteries over a millennia ago, hence they already had a workable theory behind their experiments.

Some archaeologists have made the incredible argument that they probably weren't batteries because after thousands of years there was no electrolyte left in them. This is typical of the excuses evolutionists use when confronted with this kind of evidence. Although Steibing  attempted to dismiss them as not actually being batteries, he admits himself that he had no idea what they were used for. (12)

An iron pillar in New Delhi, India, 22 ft. high, dating back to at least 500 A.D., was forged with a high degree of metallurgic skill, as the iron is so pure that a thin coating on its surface formed by oxidation prevents further deterioration from occurring, thus it has shown almost no sign of rust through the centuries although being exposed to the elements, and modern metallurgists are amazed by the technology of the forgers who accomplished this. (13)

Damascus steel was the hardest steel ever known until fairly recently. Swords of this high carbon steel were made as far back as two thousand years ago. The swords that the Crusaders used were made of Damascus steel during the middle ages. The formula which they used to forge this steel with was lost centuries ago and it has never been duplicated. It has only been with the advent of modern technology that we can now make steel with the tensile strength of Damascus steel.

Many of these pieces of evidence of a former highly developed scientific technology lost to present day knowledge had lain in Museums around the world for years as curiosities until modern science had developed to a point to where we understood what they actually were! A centuries old crystal lens that required a high degree of precision math and technology to create was found in the desert sands of Assyria.

It dates from at least six hundred years before the common Christian era. A. Hyatt Verrill wrote: " . . . a true lens made from quartz was discovered by Dr. Layard at Nimrud, near Nineveh, in Assyria . . . In 1853 Sir David Brewster, F.R.S., exhibited this lens at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Sir David, who had devoted a lifetime to optics, declared it to be an exceptionally finely and accurately ground lens. It is now in the British Museum." (Verrill, Americas Ancient Civilizations, pp.306; Museum of Antiquity, L. Yaggy and T.L. Haines, A.N., pp.346)."

An ancient man-made canal runs across the entire nation of Thailand. It is of unknown antiquity, and whoever the unknown genius was who designed it had a great knowledge of engineering sophistication, for unlike the two modern canals, the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal, it has no need of sluice gates to control the level and flow of the water. This must have required an incredible amount of technical skill and knowledge of hydraulics to excavate. It would have been a truly stupendous feat for even a modern nation to have attempted to create.

High up in the Andes in South America there was once an ancient culture that existed long before the Incas conquered Peru, that had erected the gigantic stone monuments found at Tiahuanaco and Sacsayhuamán. Modern archaeologists claim that within only a few hundred years before the Spanish conquest the Inca culture developed from a state of savagery and then built these giant edifices, despite the fact that the Incas had no metal tools for stone working, no carts or wagons used for transport, no pulleys or winches for hauling and hoisting heavy objects, no practical use of the wheel, and no heavy draft animals such as horses or oxen to help haul the huge blocks of stone up the mountains and lift them into place. Even though the Incas had crowbars there is no indication that they understood the application of the lever.

Archaeologist A. Hyatt Verrill and his wife Ruth explored the West Indies, the Guineas and Central and South America for more than forty years, conducting many expeditions into remote regions of South America. Verrill wrote in Americas Ancient Civilizations: "The origin of the ancient Peruvians has always been a most intriguing mystery. They seem to have had no beginning, no evolutionary development, no intermediate steps from barbarism to high cultures and from cultures to an advanced civilization. As far as any known evidences to the contrary are concerned they seem to have sprung spontaneously, fully developed from the deserts and the Andes. In the Andean region, where the ancient civilization reached its peak, no traces of a primitive or archaic culture have ever been found; the most ancient remains showing a cultural development equal to if not superior to the latest pre-Columbian remains."

"Innumerable theories, suppositions and fanciful ideas have been offered in explanation of this mystery, but even the most plausible of these have never been substantiated by facts. As we know that a civilization cannot be developed all at once it is obvious that the Peruvian civilizations must have been introduced from some other area . . ."(14)

The Incan capital city of Cuzco was built with an incredible amount of engineering skill, and yet even many of these Inca structures were built on top of the foundations of earlier structures that predate any known Incan culture. In many cases the Incas built around and on top of the ancient stone work, or filled in parts that had been damaged by earthquakes. Even at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1528 the Incas told the Spanish conquistadors that the titanic edifices of stone at Cuzco had "always been there."

These Incan fortresses were made out of blocks of andesite, some of the hardest rock known, with some of these single blocks of stone weighing over 3oo tons each, yet they were so perfectly fitted together without mortar that even a knife blade could not be inserted between them.

The terraced citadel of Sacsayhuamán was 60 feet high and more than a third of a mile long. How could a culture with no metal tools have carved out huge blocks of stone from rock so hard that no ordinary stone chisel would be able to cut into it? It would take lifetimes for the stones to be properly cut to fit together in the perfect manner that we find them!

What was the origin of these ancient monuments constructed by some pre-historic culture hidden beyond the mists of historic (but not Biblical) time? Sascayhauman is a mighty stone fortress built upon an artificially leveled mountain top above Cuzco. Verrill wrote that it "is as well designed and laid out as any fortress built by our modern army engineers. But to see it one would feel that it must have been made by giants. Everywhere are enormous blocks of stone weighing fifty, one hundred or even two hundred tons with many that weigh more than three hundred tons, each and every one as accurately and smoothly cut and surfaced and as perfectly fitted as are the smaller blocks forming the walls and buildings in Cuzco." (Verrill, pp.245)

Even more incredible is that to accomplish this feat, most of these stones had been quarried from 60 to 200 miles away and then brought up to the summit of the steep mountains over rough country, across rivers, and over great ravines! The largest crane in the world today would not be able to move something so massive over such distances. Even with our present state of knowledge no engineer has any good solution as to how they did it. Attempts have been made to float blocks of stone part way along the river system weighing only a fraction of the amount of the ones that were used by these ancient people, and even this was no small task. (15)

Verrill describes some of these achievements in his classic America's Ancient Civilizations: "The most striking and remarkable features of Cuzco and other ancient Peruvian Andean cities are the stupendous, amazing walls constructed of most perfectly cut stones put together without mortar or cement, yet so accurately fitted together that even today a thin one hundredth of an inch blade cannot be inserted between them."

No two stones are alike, some weigh up to twenty tons, some are hexagonal in shape, others have twenty four and even thirty-two angles, yet the "edges of every stone are smoothly, evenly, sharply beveled or chamfered" (Verrill).

Verrill further wrote of the advanced state of stone masonry and mathematics required to have hewn and fitted these stones: "No expert modern stone mason working with the best steel tools and the most highly perfected stone-cutting machines could produce anything more accurate. Anyone at all familiar with stone working can see that each and every block must have been mathematically planned and laid out beforehand, for it manifestly would have been impossible to life the immense blocks in and out and gradually trim them to a fit."

"Moreover, in many cases the stones are cut in such shapes that they could not have been laid in position but must have been pushed into place between the adjoining stones. . . The only way in which stones could have been fitted with such incredible accuracy was by cutting each block to extremely fine measurements or by using a template, a process that would indicate advanced knowledge of engineering and the highest mathematics . . . Evidently, also the cutting of these stones and the building of the wall was neither very difficult or slow work, for they are everywhere in and about Cuzco and throughout the surrounding territory, and very often where a roughly, hastily built wall of cobbles or rubble would have served just as well." (Verrill, pp.243-244.)

Verrill asks, "How were such titanic blocks of stone brought to the top of the mountain from the quarries many miles away? How were they cut and fitted? How were their raised and put into place? No one knows, no one can even guess. There are archaeologists, scientists, who would have us believe that the dense, hard andesite rock was cut, surfaced and faced by means of stone or bronze tools. Such an explanation is so utterly preposterous that it is not even worthy of serious consideration. No one ever has found anywhere any stone tool or implement that would cut or chip the andesite, and no bronze ever made will make any impression upon it. Moreover, even were there stone hammers and picks capable of cutting the rock it would have required lifetimes, centuries, to have hewn a three hundred ton or even a fifty ton block of the stone into anything even approaching the monoliths that are there by thousands. Furthermore, every engineer, every stone mason who has examined the Cuzco stone work has declared that it would have been utterly impossible to have cut, fitted and chamfered them without using a chisel and a maul; that only by striking a chisel a sharp blow could the stones have been cut. But no one has ever found a stone chisel capable of cutting the dense hard rock. A stone chisel, even if of a material harder than the rock, would be shattered and broken when struck. Even had the ancient Peruvians possessed tools of tempered steel it would have required a vast army of expert stone masons many lifetimes to have cut and fitted the tens of thousands of the blocks that are in Cusco, alone, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of others at Ollantay, Veracocha, and elsewhere."

Verrill described the incredibly difficult task of constructing these edifices: "To quarry and cut a block of stone weighing several hundred tons and transport it across many miles of rough country, ferry it over wide rivers, and lift it to a mountain top would be a titanic undertaking even today. Railways would have to be built, immense steam cranes used and steel cables and pulleys employed. To be sure it is no great feat for a modern steamship to lift a hundred ton locomotive and swing it aboard ship, but that is simply a lifting job and adequate power and derrick booms are all that are needed. But it is quite another job to carry such a weight overland and across rivers and to the summit of a thousand foot mountain. How such feats were accomplished by the ancient Peruvian engineers no one can satisfactorily explain. If man power alone were used it would have required so many men hauling and tugging that they would have been in one another's way. And how could they have fastened the necessary thousands of ropes to a stone monolith?" And yet we find that "hundreds upon hundreds of them were transported." After the gigantic blocks were moved to the mountain top, they were cut and precisely fit with no mortar or cement so that even the "thinnest knife blade cannot be inserted between them."(pp.256-257 Verrill)

As has been stated, these walls were made of andesite, an extremely hard rock that even a diamond drill would have difficulty cutting into. Verrill conducted an experiment (Ibid., pp.245) with five Indian laborers in Panama to see how easy it would be to cut into diorite rock, much softer and easier to work with than andesite. He selected a section of a broken column in some Chocle ruins and had them work on a rough design he had drawn on the column. Although they worked from morning to night for ten days they made no noticeable impression on the column and merely succeeded in wearing out their tools.

In Verrill's day many archaeologists derided the idea that there was an ancient culture before the Incas that had achieved such a high degree of technology, despite the evidence that Verrill and others had shown. "Many of the great cathedrals of Europe were hundreds of years in the building," wrote Verrill, " Hundreds of highly skilled artisans worked steadily, equipped with excellent tempered steel tools, cutting and carving, setting stones in place; living and dying with their work unfinished and leaving their sons, their grandsons and their great grandsons to carry on until, after centuries, the building was completed."

It took the Europeans over a millennia to reach the standard of culture and knowledge to achieve these vast enterprises. Verrill's response to the preposterous notions of archaeologists such as Steibing, (16) who claim that the Incan culture had only been a few centuries old when the Spanish conquered them and that the ancient ruins in Peru only dated from a civilization that began with the Incan Emperor Manko-Kapak around 1300 A.D. was "Tommy rot!" Even at the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1530 the Incas had no knowledge of when or by whom the magnificent structures were built.

Verrill mentioned that the cathedral of Notre Dame was 551 years in its construction, Rheims 200 years, Tours 380 years, Nantes 406 years, Canterbury 400 years, Worms 100 years, and St. Stephens 200 years. "Yet according to some of these modernizing archaeologists the Peruvian Indians, equipped with nothing better than stone and bronze implements, erected hundreds upon hundreds of palaces, forts, walls and temples and other structures far larger, more massive and entailing fully as great a knowledge of engineering, mathematics and stone cutting as any building in Europe, all in the brief space of less than three hundred years from the time they were primitive savages dwelling in thatched huts?" (Verrill,pp.248)

Today scientists finally are forced to admit in the light of the overwhelming evidence that the Moche and Chimu cultures of Peru predated the Incan culture by hundreds, and possibly thousands of years. The Valdivian civilization in Ecuador dates back to 3000, B.C., while the remnants of a pre-Incan culture in Peru known as the Chimus has been unearthed, where it was discovered that they used quite a sophisticated technique for the gold leaf finishing on their ornaments, which was an electro-plating process to gild their metal sculptures with gold! (17)

In order to accomplish this task they needed first of all an electric current and then they would have had to heat the gold to be gilded up to temperatures in the neighborhood of 1450 degrees Fahrenheit! Not only was a knowledge of producing and harnessing electrical current necessary, but a sophisticated knowledge of physics, thermodynamics, and chemistry would have been needed as well. The Chimus also preformed successful brain surgery, as evidenced by skulls that have been found with remarkably skillful incisions cut into them. One skull that had a silver plate inserted in it showed clear evidence that the patient survived the operation and lived for many years afterward, as the bone had grown around the edges of the plate. (18)

Verrill wrote: "On the contrary, all the evidence indicates a culture or a civilization long out dating the Incan culture and far surpassing it in many respects. There are no transitional remains showing that the one merged into the other." (Verrill pp.246-248) It is apparent that the Incas inherited much of their knowledge from their remote ancestors, and these grand edifices were built by a pre-historic civilization that was by no means primitive, perhaps dating from before the Flood of Noah itself. Whatever the case, normal archaeological schemes of a band of primitive hunter-gatherers migrating down into South America from the Bering Straight of Alaska and within a few generations erecting such fantastic edifices with merely a stone age knowledge and culture makes no sense whatsoever.

The Bering Straight theory for the origin of all of the inhabitants of North and South America has become the standard thesis since being proposed a couple of centuries ago, despite the fact that there are a number of racial differences between the South American Indians and Mongoloid people of Asia, the long, narrow, often Roman shape of the nose of the Incas instead of the smaller, flatter nose found among almost every oriental race being just one example.

Recent tests in genetic racimisation studies have thrown this old conjecture into doubt as well.

Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institute said of the North American Indians, the supposed ancestors of the South American Indians, "The last big breakthrough occurred in the 1920's and '30's with the discovery that Paleo-Indians were here toward the close of the Ice-Age, nearly 12,000 years ago, hunting giant bison and mammoths. Now the cumulative evidence from a host of sites convinces most of us that man was here many thousands of years earlier. But so far we haven't found that unarguable site that established to everyone's satisfaction just who these people were or when they came." (19)

The thesis that the South American Indians had developed their culture and learning within the span of a mere two or three hundred years old development from a primitive hunter-gatherer society as most archaeologists have been trying to pawn off on the public for years, is utterly preposterous. The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu. It stretched from the border of modern day Ecuador to central Chile, a span equal to the distance from New York to the Panama Canal. They not only excelled in building projects, they had a highly developed science of agriculture, with an extensive irrigation system of aqueducts to water their crops, so well constructed that sections of it are still usable today. The name for the Andes Mountains came from the Spanish term andanns, which meant terraced hillsides. Their water system consisted of perfectly fitted conduits that spanned mountains and ravines. They had cultivated many varieties of cotton, maize, squash, beans, potatoes (potatoes are not native to Ireland, Europe got the potato from Peru), peppers, cacao, squash, tomatoes, several distinct varieties of peanuts, pumpkins, melons, avocados, and sweet potatoes. They had more than a few varieties of corn, black corn, field corn, sweet corn, and popcorn.

Verrill tells us that in the four hundred years since Europeans reached the shores of America even the best agriculturalists have failed to produce a single distinctive new variety of corn that was not already known to the ancient Peruvians. In fact, at the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1532, the Peruvians had already developed frost-proof tomatoes and potatoes, mote corn, purple insect-proof potatoes and varieties of squash.(Verrill,pp.265-266)

Verrill wrote: "To have cultivated and hybridized and developed food and other plants from the original wild forms to their highest perfected state would have required countless centuries, and to have domesticated and bred unknown wild animals to the status of llamas, Guinea pigs and dogs would have required fully as great a period of time. Yet the most ancient Peruvian people (aside from the pre-pottery coast race) possessed all of these,proving beyond all controversy that the various cultured people who we consider the most ancient were, in reality, the descendants of people who had devoted ages to the cultivation and perfection of plants and animals. No race, no matter how well equipped, no matter how industrious and intelligent, could by any remote possibility have accomplished such results in a few hundred years." (20)

The Incas and their predecessors excelled in creating marvelous textiles, as fine or better in quality than anything that has been made since. They knew of every weave that we know of today, as well as a few that were too intricate to be reproduced on modern mechanical looms. Modern shirting has roughly 60 cross threads per inch, whereas the Peruvians were able to weave 250 and as much as 500 threads into the same space. (21)

They also produced prosthetic limbs for warriors wounded in battle. The Peruvians did know of the wheel, they simply never made any practical use of it, one obvious reason for this being that they did not have large, heavy draft animals such as horses or oxen available for domestication to make the use of large wagons and chariots efficient. Prior to the Spanish conquest the Incas had a federal system of government quite similar to the British parliamentary system. They had a royal emperor, but he was by no means absolutely supreme. He had a cabinet of four men whom he appointed and who had to agree with any decree that he ruled on, otherwise it would not pass into law. There was a "Supreme Court", known as the Apu-Auquis, that could revoke any law made by the Emperor. Each district had its own governor, and each village had its own mayor known as a Suyuyoc as well as a town council known as Auquis. The mayors and town officials were voted into office in regular elections by the people.

The Inca had a system of highways made of set stones that was well maintained and covered seven thousand miles, in fact it was longer than the old Roman Empire. They had state supported "rest stops" for travelers along the highway, roadside inns where grain and supplies was stored at regular intervals. They had a system of transmitting messages by mirrors during the day and by torches at night so that reports could be sent for hundreds of miles across the empire in only a matter of hours. Their remarkable highway system had suspension bridges that spanned rivers, it went over mountain passes, and in one place tunneled straight through nine hundred feet of solid rock underneath a mountain. Their water system consisted of graded and fitted stone pipes, viaducts and canals that ran for hundreds of miles. They had a sanitary system of underground stone pipes accurately graded with sluice gates to control the run-off into canals. (Verrill, pp.207)

Their High Priest was next in importance to the supreme Inca, (originally the word Inca meant the Ruler of the people, later it came to mean the entire culture), but he had to obey the laws like all the rest of the people, and the budgets for the church and state were separate. Socially there were not great distinctions among the people, with the exception of the royal household and the priesthood, every community was planned in advance, the aged and sick and orphans were taken care of, often the Inca had the poorest land, since he as Emperor was supported by the state. In 1589 Mancio Sierra wrote that when the Spaniards conquered Peru they found no thieves, liars, or lazy persons in the Empire. There were records of governors having been put to death for taking land that belonged to the people. Their mathematics were quite advanced, it had to be to administrate the taxes for such a large Empire, they could do rapid calculations on hand held rope calculators known asquipus, made of different colored, braided fibers with knots of various positions and sizes woven into them to indicate dates and measurements. There is also an interesting Incan "abacus" used to calculate with, although it is in reality no actual abacus in the sense that we know of, it is a combination of squares laid out on a flat table with a possible base five system to count with (this is based on my own conclusions and subject to change with more research).

I have a copy of one of these interesting devices, and am quite convinced that when once mastered it could rival a pocket calculator.

The fact is, the Incan Empire survived for more than five hundred years without serious problems, a remarkable reign among world powers. Prescott's classic History of the Conquest of Peru (1848) is among the better sources for information on the Incan Empire, as well as Verrill's excellent work. (22)

Even though the Incan Empire had expanded greatly in geographic terms prior to the Spanish conquest, this did not necessarily mean that there was a corresponding cultural development. Like the old Roman Empire that had inherited much of its' culture from the earlier Greeks, who in turn owed much of their civilization to the earlier Aegean, Minoan, and Middle Eastern civilizations, this "Rome of the New World" inherited much of their knowledge from their forbearers, imposing the Law of the Inca on their conquered neighbors much as the Pax Romana was maintained throughout the Empire of Rome, thus what was thought to have been a development was actually a legacy from a former age.

Another monument in stone giving testimony to the fact that these inhabitants of the New World were the inheritors of a grand culture passed down from the vanished civilization of their ancestors would be the ruins of Tiahuanaco that sit high up in the Andes mountains of South America near Lake Titicaca, just over the border of Peru in Bolivia. At 13,500 feet above sea level it is much too high an altitude and location for any normal commercial center to prosper. Nearly any city in ancient and modern times needed to be built near the sea or a river system, or where a trade route would conveniently pass near it, and Tiahuanaco is obviously not situated close to any ocean or large river system, yet it has ancient docks and quays, indicating that it was once a seaport, which runs counter to modern geological, and paleological formulas, since it is traditionally believed that the mountains were raised millions of years before man arrived on the earth.

The Incas had no idea who the people were that built the immense structures at Tiahuanaco either. The stone steps alone at the "Temple of the Sun" weighed forty to fifty tons each. At the western edge of the Temple of the Sun is the great Gateway of the Sun, a massive structure with intricate carvings made out of andesite. Many of the stone slabs weigh from one hundred to two hundred tons , while blocks of stone fifty to one hundred tons are strewn about everywhere.

Brazilian Professor Arthur Posnansky devoted nearly fifty years to the study of the ruins of Tiahuanaco and determined that it was part of an amazing astronomical arrangement for finding the solstices and months of the year. So accurately were these built that "careful measurements with micrometer gauges and other modern instruments showed that nowhere was there a variation of more than one fiftieth of an inch from true while the straight edges of the carvings showed no unevenness when a steel rule was placed upon them." (Verrill, pp.207)

They did not work by guesswork, since levels and plumbs used for measuring were found near the ruins, but no single tool has ever been found that could have been employed for the cutting of these monuments.

From 1926 through 1940 engineers, astronomers, and mathematicians worked on the ancient astronomical alignments of the huge buildings and calculated the amount that the earth had changed on its axis since they were built, determining that the ruins dated back to roughly 10,000 years B.C.! The extreme age of this is confirmed by fossilized human skulls discovered there that are in the museum at La Paz.

Evolutionists have no method to date these ruins, as we have seen from Gowlett sites that are less than 300,000 years old are too young to date by potassium-argon and uranium lead methods, the other method used to measure ancient human settlements (besides stone tools) is Carbon-14, which is extremely inaccurate.

The only explanation for these cultures and for the tremendous monolithic building projects found all over the world is that there was once a highly advanced civilization that had technical skills far beyond anything that we have any knowledge of today who produced these monuments, a remnant civilization left over from before the Flood of Noah itself. It is interesting that the name Tiahuanaco in the Incan language means "The Place of the Dead," or "The Place of Those Who Were."

Verrill wrote, "For some unknown reason the city (Tiahuanaco) was abandoned before the greatest buildings had been completed. Everything was halted. All work stopped and Tiahuanaco was deserted. . . .What great catastrophe, what threat, what cataclysm caused this no one knows." (Verrill, pp.208). Indeed, what could have thrown these colossal stones around like pebbles, as they were found strewn about the area, in many places a few yards from their original position.

After the Spaniards conquered Peru, they attempted to pull down the remaining blocks of stone from the ancient ruins at Cuzco but were unsuccessful, so they built their churches on top of them. Noted author and science writer Jonathan Leonard wrote of the Incan architecture: "For their finest work they shaped, finished, and fitted massive blocks with such amazing accuracy that the joint between any two of them can be seen as a hairline but cannot be felt with a fingertip." (23)

The great earthquake of 1950 destroyed many of the Spanish structures that had been standing in Cuzco since the time of the colonization, but it had little or no effect on the Incan foundations underneath that these later edifices had been built on. Could they have been originally raised up with the Andes after the time of the Flood?

The entire region of Central and South America is actually full of amazing building projects and sites that testify to an ancient, sophisticated culture, much more advanced and older than traditional archeology would like to admit, although slowly, as more and more evidence is uncovered, the fact becomes undeniable. The origins of the Zapotec of Central America civilization are shrouded in mystery. The Zapotecs had an advanced level of agriculture, astronomical science, mathematics and architecture from their earliest existence, with no signs of having developed them from a more primitive culture, and no record of migration from neighboring societies (William R. Corliss, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts).

In the mountains close to Monte Alban in Central America, old ruins were discovered where an entire mountain had been leveled off to form a plain for the Zapotecs to build their city on (Verrill pp.72).

Verrill wrote: "It was the most stupendous, most remarkable feat of engineering ever accomplished by any pre-Columbian race in the New World. Building air strips on tropical islands or on the roughest terrain is child's play by comparison. Even today it would be a tremendous undertaking; with power driven drills, high explosives, bulldozers and drag-lines and all of our modern up-to-date mechanical devices and resources it would take years to accomplish the feat."

Again, the Zapotecs had no wagons, carts, or heavy draft animals.

Verrill asked, "Can anyone actually believe, as archaeologists claim, that the colossal work was accomplished with crude stone implements and that the broken rock was transported in baskets carried on human heads? No one with an atom of common sense and a smattering of knowledge of engineering problems can actually believe that the ancient Zapotecs cut away hundreds of thousands of tons of rock, filled yawning ravines and deep fissures with rubble, leveled an area hundreds of acres in extent and built huge, imposing structures all with no knowledge of steel tools, no explosives, no wheeled vehicles and no beasts of burden . . . Centuries, tens of centuries would have passed . . . far antedating any indications of highly cultured races now found in Mexico."

The ancient Mayan civilization in the Yucatan peninsula had a positional numbering system that was even more precise than our own modern system. When the Europeans and Romans were still using a primitive system of letters to represent numerical value the Mayan mathematicians already had the concept of zero, over 1,000 years before the Europeans learned it from the middle east and India. Not only were the Mayans quite advanced in their mathematics, they had a calender that was more accurate than our own; they had also calculated the solar year for the earth at 365.2420 days while today we have only narrowed it down to 365.2422 days.

Modern scholars are still wondering how the Mayans had the moon's orbit calculated to 53,059/100,000 of a day, since they had no fractions (or clocks)! They calculated that there were 405 full moons in every 11,960 days: today's astronomers calculate it to be 405 full moons every 11,959.888 days, thus the Mayans were off in their calculations one day for every 292 years, or five minutes every year. They calculated the year for the planet Venus at 584 days, while current astronomers calculate it at 583.92 days, thus the Mayans had a margin of error of 12 seconds per day, yet their calender went back at least 400 million years! (24) Their history begins at roughly the same time as Egyptian history, 3113 B.C., right after the Bible says the Flood occurred.

Scientists have no idea how they arrived at such accurate measurements, since as far as we have been able to determine they had no modern methods to measure time with; no telescopes, no clocks, no hourglasses, no other technical instruments. (25)

"Unquestionably the Mayan written or sculptured language was their greatest achievement," wrote Verrill. "In fact, in the opinions of many, it was the greatest achievement of any race either ancient or modern. It must have been developed at a very ancient date and appears to have sprung into use perfected for there are no known truly archaic or evolutionary forms of the inscriptions. (Verrill, pp.41) This would indicate a previous greatly advanced civilization that lay beyond the veil of time, that left their arts and sciences as an inheritance to the Mayans. That civilization was the heritage left from before the Flood of Noah.

Although the Mayans had a most advanced system of writing when the Spanish discovered them, even at that time their culture was in a state of decadence, showing that their civilization was not a development, but a legacy inherited from their more advanced ancestors.

The Spanish found volumes of writings and books that had been handed down from days of former glory, but most of Mayan science and knowledge has been lost forever. Bishop Diego de Landa described first hand what the Spanish priests did when they found these ancient Mayan texts:: "These people also made use of certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books their ancient affairs and their sciences, and with these and drawings and with certain signs in these drawings, they understood their affairs and made others understand them and taught them. We found a great number of books in these characters, and, as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree and caused them much sorrow."

The ancient, deserted city of Tiotihuacan sits roughly 30 miles Northeast of Mexico City. Nobody knows who built it. Nobody really knows when it was built, except from speculation. The Aztecs called it the "City of the Gods," and for good reason. It is at least two thousand years old and was larger than Imperial Rome, with the Pyramid of the Sun looming over the rest of the city, a structure as large at it's base as the great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. From out of nowhere it sprang up in Central American pre-history, this city of ten square miles, each avenue and building perfectly laid out in a grid pattern 15 by 30 degrees east of astronomical north.

Near the center of the City is the great Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. The Sun Pyramid is enormous, with a volume of 1,296,000 cubic yards. It is architecturally perfect in it's measurements, as is the Moon Pyramid, and the Great Compound complex in the center of the City. The Sun Pyramid and surrounding living quarters were built on a huge underlying platform 300 yards wide x 395 yards long. The entire city was built on a preconceived plan, which required an incredibly advanced amount of social, economic, and architectural achievement to have accomplished such a task. The city was surrounded by miles of suburbs, and they also ran according to the same plan, even houses built off in the surrounding hills were oriented to the same 15.5 degree North/South direction.

No modern archaeological scheme has any notion as to who the people were that constructed it or where they went afterward, the culture disappeared as the builders just as mysteriously vanished into time. How could this great city have been built by a wandering tribe of ragged, hunter-gatherers chipping flint to make hand-axes with?

The origin of the Aztec culture is likewise shrouded in mystery. Of the Aztec kingdom of central Mexico, Jacques Soustelle wrote: " . . . the Mexica, or Aztecs, as they were sometimes called in memory of Aztlan, the mythical starting-point of their wandering, never thought of themselves as anything but the heirs of the brilliant civilization that had preceded them." (26)

When the Spaniards under Cortez first laid eyes on the cities of the mighty Aztec Empire they were amazed at the advanced architecture and well ordered economy that they came upon. At the great Market place of Tlatelolco they found a thriving, open air market where the populace bartered for jaguar skins, tanned puma, deer and fox skins piled up and ready for sale, falcon and eagle feathers, cacao, innumerable vegetables and herbs, onions, peppers, beans, maize, rabbits, ducks, turkeys, hares, all types of fruit and potatoes, salt, syrup, honey, frog legs, fish, shell fish, housewares, dishes, vases, copper axes, planks and beams of lumber for building, shoes, shirts, skirts, hats, cosmetics, jewelry, torches, firewood, charcoal, dyes and ink, paper made out of bark, bamboo pipes, chairs, stoves, medicines, and ointments. There were barber shops, there were indoor and outdoor restaurants where tortillas and tamales stuffed with pimentos, beans and meat were sold to the busy shoppers, as well as deserts made of honey and maize cakes. There were even security guards known as tianquizpan tlayacaque walking through the crowd to patrol the busy multitude. (27)

Cortez and his small band of less than four hundred soldiers at first could not believe their eyes when looking down on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan; they marveled at the beauty and orderliness of this great city of perhaps five hundred thousand to one million people.

Canals ran in among the streets of the city; everywhere small curved bridges arched over the waterways to allow transit on both land and water. Houses with terraced flower gardens and trees were everywhere; parks and meeting houses; temples and the great pyramids. Cortez announced to Charles V of Spain that it surpassed in orderliness, beauty and grandeur any city of Europe at that time, and yet archaeologists tell us that it had come from a culture less than two hundred years old, while the cities of Europe had been around for many centuries and were built on the cultural foundations of the Greek and Roman civilizations from thousands of years ago in the past. (28)

Although the Aztecs believed in the inexorable law of a universe controlled by cosmic influences, to such an extent that a child's birth date could determine his character, his family life, and even his probable state in the after life, they also believed that this did not entirely interfere with his free will, but that it merely influenced the type of personality he would have. Though his tendencies toward certain character traits were affected by the time and date of his birth, through fasting, prayers, and abstinence a man could overcome an evil or weak  disposition.

It is also notable that the Aztecs had a public education system that included every child, no matter how poor the family he had been born into. The children were home schooled until the age of fifteen, although some were enrolled in public schools at the age when they could walk. At any rate, there were two schools that the children had the choice of going to after the age of fifteen. The first was a monastery run by celibate priests who stood vigils during the night, bathed in cold mountain streams during winter, and spent much of their time in prayer and fasting as good examples for their charges. This school, known as a calmecac, was for those designated by inclination or birth to be nobles and officials of state. Actually, a child of even the lowest rank and from the poorest family in Aztec society could enter it if he was worthy enough. The school was extremely rigorous, it could be compared to a modern day military academy.

The students spent much of their time fasting, in penance, and working the land, as well as being instructed in the sciences while being sternly reminded of their duties required of them as future public officials. Soustelle wrote: "The whole emphasis of this education was on sacrifice and abnegation. . . Above all it was a school of self control and firmness towards oneself."(Soustelle, pp.170) Soustelle quotes from Father Bernadino de Sahagun's Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, on a father's advise to his son about to enter one of these schools: "'Listen my son,'said a father to a boy about to enter a calmacac, 'you are going to be looked down upon, humiliated and despised. Every day you will cut agave-thorns (on your skin) for penance, and you will draw blood from your body with these spines and you will bathe at night even when it is cold . . .Harden your body to the cold . . .and when the time comes for fasting do not go and break your fast, but put a good face upon both fasting and penance." Soustelle, pp.170, from Father Bernadino de Sahagun, Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, (Mexico, Pedro Robredo Pub., 1938, Vol.ll, pp.222

The other type of school was called a telpochcalli, and was much less strict than thecalmecac schools. These were in the line of trade schools, the discipline was nowhere near as rigorous, the boys were permitted much more of a social life, although even a graduate of one of these schools had the opportunity of rising to the highest position in Aztec society if he applied himself. Girls were consecrated to the temples at an early age, and taught various arts and crafts by aged priestesses much like the Catholic nuns who run many parochial schools. They lived chaste lives there until they were married.

Women had a highly honored place in Aztec society, the royal line of the Aztecs was originally established by a woman in the lineage of Quetzalcoatl. At Tula a woman had once held supreme power. Even a man of humble origin could become a head of state by marrying a woman of royal blood. note: A peasant became a governer of a province after his marriage to a royal daughter of Itzcaotl. Chimalpahin Qauhtlehuanitzin, (Domingo Francisco de San Anton Munon, Anals, Paris, 1889, pp.108.)

Darwin believed that so-called primitive people such as the Indians of Central and South America (Darwin mentioned them often as "savages" in his Descent of Man) did not hold the institution of marriage in very high esteem: "What ancient nation, as the same author asks, can be named that was originally monogamous?" (Descent, pp.329)

However we find that many nations had a high concept of marriage, the marriage of an Aztec man and woman was accompanied with a great deal of pomp and ceremony, and the new bride and groom spent the first four nights of their honeymoon in prayer before they consummated the marriage. It was only on the fifth day, after they were blessed by a priest, that they entered into a conjugal relationship. Before the marriage, the young man and woman were instructed on all the duties of married life, and the importance of being responsible, faithful, and caring for each other.

Soustelle wrote:"The Mexicans had a lofty conception of public service and of the authority that went with it: the greatest lord was bound to obey the orders of a simple messenger bearing the commands of a court of law. But at the same time the laws and customs were terribly severe: woe to the drunken judge, the over-accommodating judge; woe to the dishonest civil servant. The sentence of the king of Texcoco was always quoted as an example-he, hearing that one of his judges had favored a noble against a maceualli (person of humble rank), had the unrighteous judge hanged. If the power was very great, the duties were very great."

The higher a man rose in rank, the less time he had for himself. (Soustelle, pp.142.)

The Aztecs vision of the Emperor's role very closely resembled the classic Greek and Chinese ideas of the benevolent Philosopher-King looking over his people as a father did his children, reminding one of the Biblical prophecies of the future David, the beloved of the Lord who will shepherd his people.

In comparison with the corrupt, greedy, and licentious Kings and heads of state in Europe reigning at that time, Soustelle informs us: "All the contemporary documents strongly emphasize this aspect of the ruler as protector. The pattern depends upon him; and in order that this pattern may be good, humane and in conformity with the needs of the people, the emperor must control his passions-they left him in no doubt upon this point on the day of his election . . .It was the sovereign who was to be the first to obey this law of moderation, and to subdue his passions, for everything depended upon him. The enlightened despot was the ideal of the time, the philosopher-emperor able to command himself in order to govern for the good of all." (Soustelle, pp.226-227.)

Father Sahagun wrote of the instructions given to the King in public speeches when he assumed the reigns of head of state: "Lord, now you shall bear the responsibility and care of this nation. The weight of the government will be born on your back. Our god has set the task of governing the people on your shoulders, in your lap and in your arms . . .You oh lord shall carry this nation and nurture it for many years as though it was a child in a cradle . . . Understand lord that from this time henceforth you shall walk along a high and narrow path with great precipices on both your right and your left . . .Show meekness in using your authority . . .Do not speak nor act rashly . . .listen to both those who bring you grievances and to those who speak peacefully . . .be fair to all and punish no one unjustly . . .do nothing in haste or anger . . .Speak not in anger to any person, nor frighten one in your wrath, lest you be despised . . .may your heart be as the heart of an ancient one, strong and immovable . . .give not your strength over to women . . .your position (icpalli) is not for idle pleasures nor selfish indulgence, much the rather it is one of great responsibility, sadness and penance." (Sahagun, Vol.ll, pp.83-92.)

This type of lofty ideal in government service with its exalted notions of human society were far beyond the brutal, unsophisticated ken of Darwin and his band of evolutionists who have misled us for more then a century in their rather crude notions of the development of human culture.

Aztec tradition relates many tales of the good King Nezaualcoyotl, by all accounts a historic personage, who shared items from the royal household for those who were poor, aged and sick, and for those wounded in war. Soustelle wrote: "The speeches exchanged between the newly-elected emperor and the chiefs, and his address to the people give an idea of the Mexican conception of the sovereign dignity. He had undoubtedly been chosen by the magnates, but the official theory was that he was chosen by the gods, especially by Texcatlipoca, he who sees all in his magic mirror; and therefore his first duties were towards them . . .His remaining duties were towards the people: he was traditionally known as 'the father and mother' of the Mexicans. He owed them justice, and he was to struggle for them against famine, so that they might have 'an abundance of the fruits of the earth.' The fundamental ideas of the Aztec monarchy, as they show through the stereotyped official formula, are not without dignity; there is a sense of the public good, and the feeling of a real unity between the rulers and the ruled. Furthermore, everything goes to show that the emperors took their duties seriously. Reign after reign, they are to be found in the traditional histories zealous not only in increasing the empire and building temples but also in coming to the help of the unfortunate-there is Motecuhsoma l, for example, distributing food and clothing to the entire population, or Auitzotl sharing out 200,000 loads of maize among the victims of the Flood."(Soustelle, pp.90.)

Soustelle (pp.83-84) also tells us that the Aztecs were not unfairly taxed, that there was a system in place to insure that no one was unfavorably burdened. In addition, they had a state pension plan to provide for the elderly. This system of government was remarkable, and shows a greatly advanced civilization with roots dating back far beyond a mere couple of hundred years that modern archaeologists tell us it had existed. And yet, where did they attain such a high degree of culture and knowledge from?

Hammond Innes wrote: "From this brief summary of the origins and background of the Aztecs it will be seen that-extraordinary though their race was-they were not the creators of the advanced civilization that the conquistadors found at Tenochtitlan. They inherited it, and there is no evidence that they contributed very much to that inheritance (Innes, pp.96).

I do not wish to entertain the current popularized notion though, as has been the vogue with recent writers, that the Indians in Central and South America lived in some sort of idealized tropical paradise, free from want and disease, and that Europeans were totally bent on brutally enslaving them and were responsible for all of their present ills. The Inca, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations, as has been noted, were not in a state of ascendancy. Many of their common, everyday social customs were hideously barbaric, while surrounded by decadent reminders of the achievements of their forebears.

With all of their cultural development, they were sunk in the deepest levels of depravity in the way that they practiced their religion, while many of their cultural institutions gave little evidence of any type of recent philosophical, theological, or scientific advancements immediately prior to the Conquest by the Spanish in the early Sixteenth Century. This contradiction, of a highly advanced culture existing side-by-side with the basest of social and ethnic practices, with various tribes of Indians taking others captives for use in their cannibalistic orgies and ritual human sacrifices, reminds one of the book Lord of the Flies, the story of a group of young boys stranded on an island without the benefiting constraints of the religious and moral cultural values in civilization to guide them, and they soon reverted to savagery.

Thus it would seem that instead of the culture of Meso-America being on the ascendancy when the Spanish arrived, they were actually in a decline, while still preserving the knowledge and culture of a previous civilization that we have no knowledge of, a civilization that began after the Flood of Noah, and whose founders preserved the knowledge of a highly advanced people who lived on earth before the flood itself.

As evidence of this, we see that the various tribes were in a perpetual state of warfare with one another, and the "tax" that the Aztecs put on conquered neighbors was typically an annual tribute of victims to be sacrificed on their bloody alters, often numbering in the thousands.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1492-1581?), a Spanish soldier who accompanied Cortez during the conquest of Mexico, wrote in his Verdadera historia de la conquista de la New Espana, "Everywhere in the villages through which we passed between Veracruz and Mexico, there were temples and oratories where human sacrifice had taken place; there were as many of them as there are churches and chapels in Castile . . .There was no banquet that did not call for human flesh."

It has recently been found that even the Peruvian Incas, considered to be comparatively mild in regard to the barbaric practice of cult sacrifice, conducted human sacrifices more often than had previously been thought. When a new Sapa Inca (Emperor) was chosen, as many as 200 children might be sacrificed to appease the gods and ensure a long and prosperous reign. The children were well fed before being sacrificed so that they would not enter into the gods presence crying and hungry. Sacrifices were also conducted during times of famine, disease, or when a military victory was desired. The victims for the sacrifice again, often were chosen from conquered, neighboring tribes as a regular tribute for the bloody deities the Incas worshiped.

That these victims were not voluntary offerings is evident from frescoes that have survived showing those chosen to be sacrificed chained up in preparation for the event.

When Columbus first came to the New World, he found the dominant tribe in the Carri bean, known as the Caribs, eating their enemies, and they commonly castrated any rival male members of surrounding tribes. The best sources that we have indicate that human sacrifice was a comparatively recent historical development among most of these people; the earlier we go back in time the less evidence we find that this bloody rite was practiced in the very beginning of their culture, again showing a gradual decline in civilization, with a gradual degeneration from the original lofty notion of one Supreme, Invisible God who had created all things, into a form of polytheism and spirit worship, where the cultic practice of human sacrifice took place in an attempt to appease various lesser deities.

The Aztec and Inca idols were encrusted by the blood of their sacrifices, and the priests often practicing a form of "channeling" in their roles as sorcerers and mediums, using drugs to practice their divination. Instead of worshiping the one God as perhaps their ancestors, the children of Noah, had done, they became obsessed with searching for guidance from astrology, spirits and oracles.

Englebert give us a rather gruesome depiction of what these first missionaries and soldiers came up against when they marched into the Aztec Empire: "Everywhere, too, Cortez and his soldiers noticed large cages, made of rows of stakes, in which young men and girls were awaiting the day of their immolation. They were well fed; they were given hot baths; care was taken, by providing them with mates, that the vexation of continence should not hinder their fattening process. The richer a landowner was, the more cages he had near his house. In the town of Cholula, where an ambush had been prepared, the invaders saw the urns that were awaiting them, as well as the salt, garlic, and tomatoes that would be used in cooking them."

"They were completely enlightened when, compelled to show them his gods, Montezuma led them to the great pyramid of Mexico. It rose above the sacred citadel where, under the direction of the high priest, five thousand priests, officiating priestly helpers, and young clerics exercised their sacred functions. The visitors climbed the 114 steps that led to the sanctuary of Vichilobos, god of war, and of Tezcatepuca, goddess of the moon."

"There, at the top, was the slaughterhouse."

"Above the slightly convex tables of stone, and upon the men bent double who serve as alters, in the midst of dances and choruses of joy, the priest with his long hair and his wide-sweeping black robe is at work. Assisted by the men who are holding the victim in position, he lays the chest open with one great stroke of his obsidian knife, snatches out the heart, presents it, palpitating, to Vichilobos, then throws it on the brazier where the incense burns. He smears with the blood the snout of the god, sprinkles with blood the walls of the sanctuary, wipes his bloody hands on his robe and runs them through his hair; then he begins again, while the victims roll over and over to the bottom of the great stairway, to be carved up by his colleagues. The thighs and other choice parts are set aside for the devout public, the entrails for the snakes, jackals, and other sacred animals; the denuded skulls are hung in festoons on poles. A cave has been discovered which contained 135,000 of them."

"The slaughter is never interrupted, for Vichilobos is insatiable, and the same is true of his neighbor Tezcatepuca, and likewise of the other divinities of the great temple, the smaller temples, and the private oratories. On festival days-and the Aztec calender is full of them-it is by hundreds and by thousands that the victims are butchered. In 1487, at the time of the dedication of the new temple, the human sacrifices numbered, some say [by the Aztecs own accounts] 72,344, others say 80,400, the most moderate estimate is 20,000-and this in four days. In ordinary times, it is enough to offer from twenty to forty thousand victims in a year. When there is a plethora of fresh meat, it is cut into thin strips that are dried for preserving." (29)

The Spanish soldiers were so horrified at these practices that they insisted that the Indian women be baptized by Father Olmedo before they had carnal relations with them, for fear of touching people possessed of the devil.

Another explanation offered at that time by some of the Spanish for the Indians bloodthirsty behavior was rather like an early evolutionary theory. Some of the Spaniards thought that the Aztecs could not be fully human, since rational man would never have practiced such gory rites and cannibalism on such a large scale. This idea was vigorously opposed by the Franciscans, who saw them as fully human, created in the image of God, and worthy of the saving message of the gospel, and who fought valiantly for the rights of the Indians, while working to improve their educational and social status from the time of the conquest on down to the present day.

Pope Paul lll sided with the Franciscans in his Veritas ipsa and Sublimis Deus, written in June of 1537, where he refuted the view of the Indians as mere animals without immortal souls (an early evolutionary view?), and encouraged evangelization and missionary work among the Priests.

The Pope wrote: "There are certain ones who claim that the Indians, not being qualified to receive the Faith, are meant to be at the service of man like domestic animals. This doctrine comes from the devil, who makes use of it to salve the conscience of those who want to enrich themselves at any cost. As Our Lord, in sending forth His apostles, directed them to teach and baptize all nations, the truth is that there is no people on earth which has not the right of keeping its own goods, and which is not called to salvation."

With this correct view as Indians being fellow brothers created by the same God, in His image, and possessing the same noble spark of divine dignity in virtue of this, the friars set about the monumental task of instructing the Indians in the Faith, and met with much success in seeing them turn from their bloodthirsty, cannibalistic rites to faith in Christ. As early as June, 1529, Father Pedro reported that they had built more than one hundred churches, and in 1531 Zumarrraga wrote to King Charles V: "More than twenty thousand idols have been destroyed." (Englebert, pp.33)

Englebert reported: "Now that the question of the nature and predestination of the Indians had been settled, it was for those among the men in Mexico who had taken the vows of religion to devote themselves to making Christians of them. . .Temples, pyramids, sculptures, images-all that recalled the idolatrous past-disappeared. The Indians were instructed and baptized by hundreds of thousands. As early as 1559 the Franciscans, who numbered 380, possessed eighty foundations; the Augustinians, who numbered 212, had forty: and the Dominicans, who numbered 210, had forty also."

What a wonderful testament to the power of the Gospel to turn men from darkness to light, and what a contrast to Darwin's opinion that the Indians of South and Central America were of less worth than cattle. Darwin expressed his confident hope that the more "civilized" races of men, and by this he meant the European races, would, through the process of evolution, replace and exterminate the less civilized races, and with their extinction evolution would be advanced. Were it not for the saving influence of the Gospel, what greater slaughter might have taken place in our history had not men of God been there to take up the mantle in defense of these Indians when the European culture reached their shores.

It should be obvious to any observer that these most ancient civilizations both in the Old World and in the New, were not beginnings, but were merely the remnants of a former, lost, world wide civilization enormously advanced scientifically and culturally. Darwin, writing in his Descent, classified men either as "savages" or as "civilized", and he indicated his belief that the wonderful Indians of South America, the descendants of the architects of these great cultures, were savages barely within the same species of man as modern Europeans, in fact he even said that he would rather be related to monkeys than to one of those "savages". He also expressed his racist belief that eventually these "savages", during the course of evolution, would eventually become extinct as more progressive, civilized nations superseded them. (Descent, pp.597, Benton)

A curious collection of maps, many of them thousands of years old, yet detailing accurate geographic features of North and South America and Antarctica, are yet another inexplicable set of relics that modern evolutionists and paleo-archeologists cannot possibly explain. Land not known until it was re-discovered fairly recently in our own time of history, has been demonstrated to have been charted by people who had knowledge of the world at a period when, by traditional standards, it should have been impossible for them to have acquired this information.

In museums around the world are ancient Chinese maps, many of them maps of the entire world, even detailing the continent of North America, yet charted over two millennia before Columbus. Evolutionists have no explanation for any of this.

We shall look at the 1513 Piri Re'is map of the world. Piri Re'is was a Turkish sea captain with a collection of ancient maps of the earth, some of them so old that they were painted on antelope skin. His real name was Ahmet Muhiddin. He was born in the town of Karaman, near Konya, Turkey, in the latter part of the fifteenth century. His father had been a former pirate who became a notable officer of the Ottoman fleet of Sultan Beyazit ll (1481-1512), and his uncle was the famous Kemal Reis. He sailed under Barbarossa, and eventually became the Commander in Chief of the Fleet of Egypt under the Ottoman Sultan in 1551. Unfortunately, the Governor of Egypt was one of his political enemies, and fraudulently reported that Reis had made off with some of the treasure from a war campaign for himself, and when the Sultan received news of this he was in a bad frame of mind toward his Admiral, so he had Reis beheaded in 1554. (30)

The Piri Reis map was actually a compilation of other, earlier maps by Reis' own hand, he stated that he made it from twenty older charts and eight Mappa Mundis (Maps of the World), some of which came from the time of Alexander the Great. One of the maps was possibly re-drawn by Columbus, although with some inaccuracies. Many of these maps charted the New World before it had been extensively explored by Europeans. The Amazon River was incorrectly identified on the Piri Reis map as two rivers instead of one, yet the maps still took into account the spherical shape of the world, since on the outer edge of the maps they represent the continents receding from view with a circular face for the earth.

As evidence that these maps were copied from far older source maps, they also had very accurate longitudinal degrees, a feat far beyond the abilities of anyone in the sixteenth century, from whence many of the maps date from. Most other maps made during the late middle ages were far inferior to these copies of ancient maps. The ability to correctly chart longitudinal degrees on maps was not re-accomplished in modern history until the invention of the chronometer in the eighteenth century; the geometry necessary for this accomplishment was not even possessed by most middle age cartographers, even most ancient Greek maps had crude, primitive longitudinal measurements.

These ancient maps were found in 1929 in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul after the hasty departure of the last Turkish Sultan. In 1956 a Turkish naval officer brought a copy of the Piri Reis map as a gift to the U.S. Hydrographic Office, and from there it was brought to Captain A.H. Mallory U.S.N.T., who happened to be an accomplished engineer, navigator, and archaeologist Mallory was fascinated by these maps and became convinced that the Piri Reis map and others represented areas of Antarctica now covered by thousands of feet of ice. These maps eventually were brought to the attention of Professor Charles Hapgood, F.R.G.S., and his students at Keene College, New Hampshire. Even with some discrepancies, the depiction of the coastlines and mountain ranges of Antarctica as far back as 1532 in the Oranteus Finaeus map indicates the existence of an ancient culture with an extraordinary knowledge of the earth's geography from a time before the ice covered the Antarctic Continent!.

Thus these maps had to have been copied from more ancient sources, as they even had details of certain parts of the coastlines of North and South America and accurate details of the mountains and coastline of Antarctica that have been under miles of ice for thousands of years. Explorers had not yet charted these areas during the age of Exploration, yet at the time these maps existed they contained detailed features of Antarctica that were not yet known since the modern science of sonar and radar in the twentieth century had not yet been perfected to detect what the land formations underneath the ice looked like, and Antarctica itself had not been discovered for another two centuries!

The Hadji Ahmed map of 1559, copied from ancient (presumably Greek) maps of the world showed a detailed version of the then uncharted western coastline of the North American before explorers and cartographers had surveyed them. It was even drawn more accurately than the maps of the more familiar east coast then being primitively charted by early Spanish, English and Portuguese explorers. It showed the Erring Straight connecting Alaska and Russia, a land feature that geologists say existed thousands of years ago but was non existent by the time of the middle ages.

Map-makers during the Age of Exploration admitted that they used some of these ancient maps to make their own inferior copies with. Some of the maps had accurate pictures of the bottom of the Atlantic ocean back in the 1700's, but where did they get their information from? The Piri Reis map shows the Sahara Desert with a river system. We know from sonar readings, fossil evidence and space photographs that reveal the underlying topography of the region that one once existed there thousands of years ago, but how did these people who made the map know, if it was only as old as the fifteenth or sixteenth century? Other maps show coastlines and glaciers over parts of Europe that would be correct were they drawn many thousands of years ago. Iehudi ben Zara made a map in 1487 in Alexandria that showed accurate profiles of islands now under water in the Aegean Sea. (31)

Professor Charles Hapgood devoted his life to studying these maps and was a correspondent with Albert Einstein. Hapgood's classic work, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, documents the research done on these maps along with the conclusion he reached that they had to have been charted by an ancient, lost civilization much more advanced in spherical and plane trigonometry than the culture of the middle ages that copied and made use of them. (32)

Albert Einstein wrote what was the forward (published posthumously) to his friend Hapgood's book Earth's Shifting Crust (Pantheon Books, N.Y., 1958). Both men realized that the typical conjectures of modern anthropologists could not explain this knowledge of the earths topography at such an early date in human history. These and many more ancient relics ignored by modern cultural anthropologists and paleontologists because they do not fit into their own mistaken schemes of man's past and earth's history, vividly lay out evidence of a previous civilization of extremely high advancement that suddenly disappeared as the result of a great global catastrophe, the worldwide deluge recorded in the Bible in the Book of Genesis.

Some of these ancient maps supposedly fell into the hands of Christopher Columbus. The story goes that before the great Library in Alexandria, Egypt was burned by Roman Legions, they looted it and took many valuable documents with them back to Rome, among which were many of these maps. Later, when the Roman Empire was divided into the Eastern and Western kingdoms, the maps found their way to the Eastern capital at Constantinople in Turkey, the seat of the Byzantine Empire of Constantine. Afterward the Turkish Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople in 1453 and ruled from there until the last Turkish Sultan was removed prior to the founding of the modern state of Turkey, when many of the maps were rediscovered.

After Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century there was a period of political turmoil in Turkey and the rest of the middle east. Many scholars fled for their lives to the west and they brought along copies of the ancient maps with them. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal invited them to live in his country. Portugal was the first nation during the Age of Exploration to seriously consider the prospect of sailing around the world.

Columbus had been born in Genoa, Italy, probably sometime between March of 1446 or 1447, although one legal document shows that he might have been born closer to 1450. In 1476 he was on an Italian merchant vessel sailing for England when they were attacked by French pirates. Columbus' ship was sunk, but he managed to swim to shore near Lagos, Portugal. He eventually settled in Lisbon, Portugal and married there.

His wife's father was a well known Portuguese sea captain who left her all of his papers, maps and logs when he died. (33)Columbus used these papers to begin making and selling maps, and it was at this same time that he became convinced that it was possible to sail west to unknown lands beyond the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the merchants and sailors of Columbus day thought that he was at the least a bit eccentric, and at the most touched in the head.

Hammond Innes wrote: "It is hardly credible that Columbus could have dreamed this up on the basis of hearsay and some vague reference in a dead sea captain's papers . . . The appearance recently of a new map acts as a reminder that, in the five centuries that have elapsed since the days of Portuguese discovery, much vital information has been lost . . . All we know is that he was so dedicated to the idea that, failing support for it in Lisbon, he went to Spain." (34)

At first Columbus sought to enlist the aid of Portugal to seek financial backing for his venture, but the Portuguese were not interested. Portugal was so involved in political intrigue at that time that there were few finances or energy to spare for further exploration after the death of Prince Henry. They also had their own sailing hero, Bartolomeo Diaz, who had recently rounded the Cape of Good Hope of Africa, so they were not too interested in this Italian sailors' dream of traveling west to reach the Indies.

When Columbus first went to King John ll of Portugal, asking for support for his expedition, King John, possibly fearing that Columbus might have been an agent for his native country of Italy, replied that they already had "information regarding the western lands more positive than the Genoese. . ." (35)

Where did they get this information of western lands from, before the voyage of Columbus?

With the official surrender of the last Moorish stronghold in Granada, Spain, on January 2, 1492, King Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain were now free to turn their attention to other things, notably the expansion of their empire. Although Columbus had not been successful in his first attempt to enlist their help, when he returned the last time King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain gave him financial backing and he was awarded the title of Viceroy and Governor-General over all new lands that he might discover in the West.

The rest, as they say, is history. (36)

The Bible was actually the chief source for Columbus' inspiration for a voyage around the world, as revealed in a book he authored titled Libro de las profecias (The Book of Prophecies), wherein he wrote: "At this time I have seen and put in study to look into all the Scriptures, cosmography, histories, chronicles and philosophy and other arts, which our Lord opened to my understanding (I could sense his hand upon me), so that it became clear to me that it was feasible to navigate from hence to the Indies; and He unlocked within me the determination to execute the idea. And I came to your Highnesses (the King and Queen of Spain) with this ardor. All those who heard about my enterprise rejected it with laughter, scoffing at me. Neither the sciences which I mentioned above, nor the authoritative citations from them, were of any avail. In only your Highnesses remained faith and constancy. Who doubts that this illumination was from the Holy Spirit? I attest that He (the Spirit), with marvelous rays of light, consoled me through the holy and sacred Scriptures (the Bible) . . .encouraging me to proceed, and continually, without ceasing for a moment, they inflame me with a sense of great urgency . . .Your Highnesses, remember the Gospel texts and the many promises which our Saviour made to us . . .The mountains will obey anyone who has faith the size of a kernel of Indian corn.

All that is requested by anyone who has faith will be granted. Knock and it will be opened to you. No one should be afraid to take on any enterprise in the name of our Savior, if it is right and if the purpose is purely for His holy service . . .Oh, how good the Lord is . . .Day and night, at every moment, let all men give to Him their utmost gratitude." (Christopher Columbus, Libro de las Prophecies, Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain, Translated by Kay Bingham, CLIE Publishers, 1990)

Although the Portuguese were the first European nation to actively plan large scale, worldwide maritime explorations, the dream of a direct Western route to the East Indies was not anything new.

Columbus himself was the inheritor of an ancient tradition that the world was spherical in shape and that by sailing West one could reach the East. He had studied the writings of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny, Marinus, and Seneca of the ancient Greco-Roman world as well as such later writers as Marco Polo, Mandeville, Pierre d' Ailly and Toscanelli who all helped to confirm his belief in the existence of possible new lands in the West across the great sea, and of a trade route to China via this Western route.

More engineering feats unexplained by modern theories of evolutionists would be blocks of stone that make the monuments described earlier at Tiahuanaco seem like pebbles in comparison. We have the acropolis of Ba'albek, 44 miles east of Beirut in the middle east contains ruins of gigantic temples, created centuries before Christ, predating the old Roman temples of Jupiter and Venus, which in many cases were built on top of the older structures.

One enclosure, called the Trilithon, is made up of three tremendous blocks of stone weighing in at 750 tons each, and each of them had to have been raised at least 22 feet to be placed on top of the smaller blocks.

Another block in a nearby quarry weighs at least 1000 tons! (37)

There is no present theory that explains how these were carved and moved into place; the traditional ideas of anthropologists are totally bereft of any validity when confronted with this evidence.

One fascinating enigma unexplained by the evolutionists story of man is the legendary lore of the Dogon tribe of Southern Mali, Africa. They live near a bend in the Niger river, often in caves in the Hombori Mountains. Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen were two French anthropologists who lived and worked with this tribe for many years. After spending more than a decade with the tribe during the 1930's they were initiated into the secret cosmological lore of the high priests.

This secret lore concerned Sirius, the "Dog Star"of Canis Major. Although Sirius is red in color, the priests told the two anthropologists that Sirius had an invisible companion star that was white, that it had an elliptical orbit, and that this other star orbits every fifty years around Sirius. The Dogons also stated that this other star was the smallest and heaviest object in the universe, so heavy that all the people on the earth could not lift it. This is rather amazing coming from a stone age culture with no advanced technology or telescopes. Amazing because today we know that Sirius does have an invisible companion star, a white dwarf star with a fifty year elliptical orbit. White dwarves are collapsed stars of incredibly dense mass, small size, and tremendous gravity!

Even though this star was first predicted in 1844 by western astronomers because of a slight wobble noticed in Sirius' movement, and was finally detected in 1862, it was not known to have been a white dwarf until recently. How could the Dogon have known this fact, and been extremely accurate in their calculations of the stars' orbit? The Dogon also knew of the rings of Saturn and spoke about the four major moons of Jupiter!

One explanation offered is that the Dogon came into contact sometime previously with Europeans or Arabs who transmitted this knowledge to them, but the Dogon had no foreign words in their vocabulary when describing their knowledge, and the information was handed down in several distinct versions among only a few trusted initiates.

Another explanation is that they are describing a mirage image of Sirius that appears once a year over the desert when Sirius sets at roughly the same time as the Sun. But this image would appear red, like Sirius, while the Dogon describe this companion star, which they name Tolo and which modern astronomers call Sirius B, as white, which it is. Also, this would not explain their knowledge of its characteristics of a white dwarf, its heaviness, nor its orbital routine.

Only one genuine explanation exists for these incredible phenomena. There was obviously a greatly advanced civilization that existed and left traces of it's knowledge before it vanished suddenly from off the face of the earth, which knowledge was passed down and inherited after it's demise by early cultures found around the entire world. This civilization was the antediluvian culture destroyed in the world-wide Genesis Flood of Noah.

While it has been demonstrated, hopefully to the readers satisfaction, that the supposed evolutionary descent of man is at best a sad hoax and as we shall see in the next chapter, at worst a terrible contributing cause to the mass genocides that occurred during the twentieth century, and that the Biblical evidence for the Flood is the best scientific explanation for the demise of the dinosaurs, there are some things that I have been careful not to say.

Even though there is good evidence that the dinosaurs lived in a much more recent era than that proposed by the evolutionists, perhaps even contemporary with ancient mankind, I am not stating categorically that the earth is only six thousand years old. I am also not stating that it is billions of years old. I am not saying that man has only been on the earth for six thousand years either, although the evidence does point to a more recent arrival of humans than evolutionists would have us believe. 

Regarding the age of the earth, most of the dating methods use subjective reasoning with pre-arranged data, with assumptions that are calculated to bring about a result acceptable to evolutionists, and there are reputable scientists who have done extensive work to show that the age of the earth reaching into the billions of years is highly questionable. To read some of this research go to the Answers in Genesis Website. Some of this is rather technical and there is not enough room in this short chapter to cover it all.

I do believe that if the earth was to have cooled down from an originally hot mass this process might have taken longer than a few thousand years, but it would not necessarily have taken billions of years and the earth might be much younger than we are led to believe. Later on in this chapter I have dealt with the time factors and some possible explanations as to how the week in Genesis I could have provided plenty of time for the formation of the world, as well as the entire cosmos.

As shown in previous chapters, all of the major dating techniques have serious flaws in them, thus we cannot state with any degree of certainty whether we have an old or a young earth. Actually, it is all relative, and much of the measurement has to do with the assumptions of how time is measured.

To give an example, time is defined and measured in a variety of ways. It can be defined as the measurement of relative distance and motion between two or more moving bodies. Time can also be measured by the rate of transfer of energy, whether it is heat, light, radiation, chemical reaction or vibration.

To take the first example, as a measurement of the relative distance between two moving bodies; an hour is defined as approximately 1/24 of the time for the earth to rotate on it's axis as measured by it's relationship to the Sun. However in Genesis, the sun was not created until the fourth day, thus during the first three days of creation an hour would have nothing to be compared to, nothing to be measured by, and would not have any objective definitive existence. A year also would have no meaning as yet either. Time as we know it would still be in a state of pre-existence, or rather, the time-space continuum would still be in a formative stage of existence. As God was creating the universe, he was also creating the time-space continuum.

So God had all the time he needed to create the universe in the first four days of creation. Thus for someone to state categorically that the first three days of Genesis consisted of twenty-four hour time frames, or for someone else to come along and state that the first three days of Genesis consisted of billions of years, these statements would have no objective meaning. So it did not take God billions of years to accomplish His work during the first three days of creation, for the concept of billions of years, or billions of seconds, perhaps did not exist yet as objective reality during the first day, because years did not exist yet either.

Thus, in essence, God had all the time He needed during the first day to create the heavens and the earth in their as yet unformed state, since before the second day, and the third day, etc. were created there was nothing to compare the first day to, nothing to measure it by; a day was not yet a seventh part of a week, since the first week was not completed yet, and as stated years meant nothing since a year, being the measurement of the rotation of the earth around the sun, did not exist because the sun was not yet created either, so there was nothing to measure years with! 
The first year did not even exist yet during the first three days of creation, if a year is to be defined as 365+/- days of a solar cycle, so it would be impossible to say that it took billions of years for the universe to have been created when a year itself had not even yet been defined.
Thus years, days, hours, seconds were as yet meaningless terms during the first day. They had potential meaning in God's providence, but were not yet set in existence. Time itself is relative, and during the first part of the creation week it is possible that time did not exist in the same continuum as we understand it today.

Remember, by the time of the completion of the second day, one day equaled ½ of the entire period of creation. By the time of the end of the third day, a day was 1/3 of the entire period of the creation. To illustrate this, at the end of the second creation day, The set of all days of the week was {1,2}. By the end of the third day, The set of all days of the week was {1,2,3), etc.

Thus time was in a fluid state of formation. And thus, if you wanted to state that the first day was 24 hours long, you could well be in your rights to say so. Conversely, if you wanted to say that the first day was billions of years long, you could state that too, although as stated previously, billions of years would have no objective meaning at this phase of creation. You could say billions of nano-seconds and it would be the same thing. There was nothing to compare a year to, nothing to use as a standard to calculate days or hours with. From a relativistic viewpoint (relativistic in physics, not theology) both statements might be considered correct. It is possible that even today time is actually slowing down (or speeding up) as the universe ages.

Let us take another example. Let us postulate an alternate universe where geometric shapes instead of days of creation were successively created by God. Now, let us further postulate that the first shape that was created was a simple line segment. How long would that line segment be before anything else was created, if it was the only thing existing in this alternate universe? Three billion miles long? Three inches long? Three trillion, trillion miles long? With nothing else in that universe to compare it to, no other standard of measurement, then we would have no idea how long the segment would be, it could be any length that we would want it to be, until more line segments and other geometric shapes were formed, and from those shapes some standard of measurement were affixed to the line segment.

From the fourth day on though, after the relationship of the sun and the earth was set in motion, each day could be definitively said to be of twenty-four hours, and when the seventh day was finished a day was 1/7 of the creation week, and our current time/space continuum was established.

It is stated that during the first day the earth was "without form"; it may not have even had a spherical shape, and thus for an hour to be defined as 1/24 of the rotation of the earth's movement as a sphere in relation to the position of the sun, before the sun even existed, would have no meaning. In fact, not until the fourth day would an hour really be able to be defined. It is also stated in the last book of the Bible that there would be a Day in the future when time as we know it will be no more.

I am not trying to take sides one way or the other here on the age of the universe (although I believe that the age of the earth, from the fourth day on when time can properly be said to have been measured, is not in any way as old as evolutionists claim it is). Time itself is relative, and during the first part of the creation week, as stated, it is possible that it did not exist in the same continuum as we understand it: Before the fourth day time was in a state of flux as God was setting up the time/space continuum. After all, it was a process, God did not make everything in one day, but seven, and He did not reveal the specific details, which must have entailed incredible cosmic events unfolding according to a divine plan by the Word of His power.

In this I am being more honest than the evolutionists with their specious statements. As recently as 1997 cosmologists were arguing whether or not the universe was nine billion years or twenty billion years old. A discrepancy of eleven billion years should show the specious nature of evolutionary cosmological calculations. With such a degree of latitude in their estimates of the age of the cosmos, how can they make any definite statements on the age of the earth?

Likewise, although the evidence of man's evolutionary origin, as shown, is speculative at best and largely fraudulent at worst, I cannot say from a purely scientific standpoint whether or not man has only been on the earth for six thousand years, or for sixty million years. Again, we simply don't know, apart from Divine Revelation that is. We do know however that as long as man has been on the earth, he has always been man, and has never descended from anything else but man either.

Adam was the first man, and he was created miraculously by the fiat of the Lord God from the dust of the ground.

We can also reach the conclusion that the evidence from ancient artifacts, universal cultural legacies and from the fossil record points to an ancient and highly advanced culture of undetermined age that was destroyed during a world wide Flood, which was responsible also for the death and entombment of the dinosaurs. It is even possible that this culture might have been on the verge of attaining interplanetary travel (although I highly dispute any concept of contact with alien beings, which is specious at best), as we see from various stone frescoes carved in ancient tombs and monuments in Central and South America, Polynesian statuettes, world-wide legends of sky chariots, and the profound celestial knowledge of tribes like the Dogon and the Maya.

Judging from the tremendous amount of cratering activity evident on the moon and on Mars, as well as from the asteroid belt circling the Sun in the very orbit where the Titius-Bode Law says there should be a planet, there have possibly been other planetary collisions and disasters on a cosmic scale throughout the history of the Universe, perhaps coincident with the Noadic Flood on Earth, perhaps unrelated.

After the world wide deluge described in Genesis, evidence of which has been discussed in somewhat more detail in Chapter Seven, the new atmospheric conditions would possibly allow the rainbow to appear in a more visible way. The Bible says, "I do set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall no more become a Flood to destroy all flesh."

So much for the story of man's past. But how has the Darwinian evolutionary viewpoint impacted human culture in the twentieth century? We shall find this out in the next chapter of The Darwin Papers.

1. Verrill, A. Hyatt and Ruth, Americas Ancient Civilizations, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1953.

2. The Holy Bible, Revelation, 6:12-14 How this might happen in the future is interesting, especially in view of what scientists predict happened in the past to kill off most of the dinosaurs.

St. John wrote in Revelation concerning the end of the age: "And the first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood (a meteor shower?), and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up . . . And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire (a great asteroid?) was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood (perhaps the muddy debris or some reddish element contained in the meteor). . . And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven (a comet?), burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the waters . . . And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise (the dust and ash throw up into the atmosphere). . . And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire (solar flare or the weakening of the ozone layer?). And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory."

3. John Anthony West, The Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, New York: Harper &Row, 1979.

4. Babylonia, by A.K. Grayson, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, Arthur Cotterell Ed., Rainbird Publishing Group Limited, 1980, pp.101.

5. Biographical Note, Euclid,fl.c.300 B.C., Great Books of the Western World, Vol.11, 1952, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc, William Benton Pub., Chicago, London, 1952.
6. Most of these works can be found in the original Spanish, to the best of my knowledge only one good treatise on Aztec medicine has ever been published in English, Paul S. Standley, Trees and Shrubs in Mexico, in Contributions From the U.S. National Herbarium, Vol.XXLLL, 1920-1926. For the Spanish texts, see Francisco Hernandez, Plantes Medicinales, Mexico.

7. The Earliest Precursor of Writing, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Scientific American, June, 1978, pp. 50.

8. Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 2nd Ed., John Wiley and Sons, 1991.

9. H.O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, ll, London: The MacMillan Co., Ltd.,1938), pp.524.

10. William H. Steibing, Jr., Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions, Prometheus Books, 1984.

11. Kenneth Brecher, Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. and a member of MIT's Center for Space Research, along with Michael Feirtag, an editor of MIT's Teaching Review, researched this curious object in their book, Astronomy of the Ancients, (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1080, pp.51-52). See also Professor Charles Hapgood's classic, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Chilton Pub., Philadelphia, 1966, pp.198.

12. William H. Steibing, Jr., Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions, Prometheus Books, 700 East Amherst St., Buffalo, New York, 14215, 1984., pp.104.

13. The Worlds Last Mysteries, Readers Digest Association, Pleasantville, New York, 1972, pp.304.

14. A. Hyatt Verrill, America's Ancient Civilizations, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1953 pp.292.

15. The Worlds Last Mysteries, pp.138, Also, Americas Ancient Civilizations, A. Hyatt Verrill, pp.236,234.

16. William H. Steibing, Jr., Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions, Prometheus Books, 700 East Amherst St., Buffalo, New York, 14215, 1984.

17. National Geographic, June 1990, pp.22, Christopher B. Donnan, Masterworks of Art Reveal a Remarkable Pre-Inca World. They could not have gilded the sculptures by dipping them in molten gold as the heat would have melted the statues, they did not rub the gold on with a mercury mixture since no traces of mercury alloy were found.

18. A. Hyatt Verrill, America's Ancient Civilizations, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1953, pp.153-154

19. National Geographic, Sept. 1979, The Search For The First Americans, Thomas Y. Canby, pp.332.

20. Verrill, pp.250

21. Leonard, Ancient America, pp.125

22. One of the greatest tragedies in history was the annihilation of the Incan culture by the conquistadors. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru well documents the Incan civilization of over six million people and its subjugation and destruction by the Spanish explorer Pizarro. This is one of the darkest and most tragic episodes in the history of mankind, the treachery of Pizarro and his wanton butchery of the Incan King, Atahualpa, after kidnapping him and holding him ransom until his empire brought in enough gold to fill one of their treasure houses for his release. The Inca ruler had every opportunity to destroy Pizarro and his little band of less than 200 men as they made their way up a steep mountain trail from the coast, while he was resting at a nearby hot springs with his army and heads of state waiting to greet these new strangers near Cajamarca, a small Inca city High up in the Andes. After Pizarro reached the city, he invited Atahualpa to supper and entertainment with him the next day.

The next day Atahualpa entered the city with his royal retinue but without his great army by his side, he had left them behind, coming in peace. Pizarro had hidden his soldiers all around the main plaza square, out of sight. When he heard through a messenger that Atahualpa was leaving his army behind, Pizarro could barely believe it, and took this as a sign of heaven's favor. Atahualpa entered the city in a royal litter, his attendants sweeping the ground in front of him, decked out in his grandest costume, entirely unaware of the vicious plot about to be hatched against him. There was nobody in sight but a Spanish Priest, who announced to Atahualpa that he was now a subject of Spain. When Atahualpa reacted angrily at this "Pizarro waved a white scarf, the awaited signal. A gun thundered, and the massacre began. The Spaniards rushed out of hiding and fell on the unarmed Indians. Their cavalry charged through the densely packed throng, trampling helpless bodies under horses' hooves. Desperately Atahualpa's retainers crowded around the royal litter to protect their ruler. They had no weapons, but they made a barrier of their flesh and clung to the horses until the Spanish cut them away with their swords."(Leonard). Atahualpa's litter was toppled and the Spanish dragged him away captive.

Innes described the terrible scene: "Atahualpa, seated head and shoulders above the clatter of speculation, may have seen the handkerchief dropped by Pizarro. He certainly saw the smoke from the cannon as it boomed out, cutting a swathe through the crowd. It was the signal, followed instantly by the battle cry- "Santiago!" The fire of the arquebuses was sharp and clear, like the crackle of fireworks, above the sudden din of cavalry charging; the Spanish foot poured into the square, their swords flashing in the late afternoon sun-steel at first, then dripping crimson as they hacked and hacked at the helpless wall of human bodies."

"The Indian chiefs died fighting with their bare hands in defense of Atahualpa. The attendants and some of the unarmed bodyguard pressed with such panic at one part of the courtyard wall that they broke it down and fled into the country beyond, pursued by the cavalry. The butchery of those that remained trapped in the square was such that even Spanish eye-witnesses say they were hacking at the defenseless Indians for a full half hour and did not desist until the sun was behind the mountains and it was almost dark . . .The massacre at Cajamarca on that fatal evening of November 16, 1532, has disgraced Spanish chivalry in the eyes of the world . . .It was the brutal stupidity of the Spaniards and the whole foul record of their behavior in Peru that history cannot stomach."(Innes, pp.290.)

Reports say at least 2,000 and perhaps up to 10,000 Indians died on that day, while the only Spanish wound on record was Pizarro accidentally getting brushed with a saber by one of his men. Leonard reports that "the flower of Incan nobility, which constituted the administrative core of the Empire" was slaughtered that day. Afterward, Pizarro did have his banquet, as promised, and invited Atahualpa, the captured monarch, to have supper with him. Pizarro held him hostage for a Kings ransom in gold. The equivalent of millions of dollars worth of gold was brought in over the next few months by the Incas to set free their captured leader. The ransom was paid, and after Atahualpa was of no more use to him Pizarro garroted him, hanging him like a common criminal. To avoid being burned alive Atahualpa became a Christian just before his death and was Baptized.

Twelve of Pizarro's captains protested against this injustice, but it did no good. Pizarro's general, de Soto, had struck up a friendship with Atahualpa and hoped that he might be released in time. Pizarro sent de Soto off to Huanachara to quell a supposed uprising. It was then that Pizarro executed Atahualpa. When De Soto returned he was horrified, but by then there was nothing he could do. As far as the uprising, de Soto reported that he had met with "nothing but demonstrations of good will"everywhere among the Incas.

After the death of Atahualpa, Pizarro put Callcuchima, Atahualpa's chief general, in irons, brought him up on false charges, (the cruelty and treachery of this man sounds unbelievable, yet these records are taken from the Spanish members of Pizarro's own brigade, Pizarro himself was eventually killed by his own men) and burned him at the stake.

With their divine leader gone, the Inca Kingdom was near the verge of chaos, and the Spaniard Conquistadors' went on a pillaging spree, raping the "virgins of the sun" in the Inca temple, killing, and looting and enslaving the peaceful Indians. The maintenance of the crops was neglected as the Incas went into hiding, the Spaniards looted their storehouses, slaughtered hundreds of lamas, melted down the gold into ingots, enslaved the Indians and put them to work in the mines, and devastated the entire Empire.

One reason that the Incas had received the Spaniards peacefully was because of their hope that this might be the return of their god. Even though their official religion was sun worship, they once had a belief in a greater God than the sun, an invisible God who had created the sun and all other things. Cieza de Leon related that this God visited them once in visible form very long ago. The called him the "Maker of all things, the Father of the Sun." They said that He was a white man, large of stature, "whose air and person aroused great respect and veneration."

This man had miraculous powers, he had the power of leveling mountains and "bringing forth springs of water in the living rock." They said that he instructed the people how they should live and spoke to them lovingly and meekly, exhorting them to be good and to use charity to all. Afterwards another man came to them who cured the sick and gave sight to the blind. At one town the people refused to hear him and would have stoned him but he called down fire from the sky. When he left he spread his cloak and walked away over the waters (a ships sail?). They had waited his return for centuries, and wondered if the coming of Spaniards might be the first sign of this.

Whether this had been an appearance of the Lord and later one of His disciples we may never know, but the Incas were sadly mistaken in hoping that Pizarro was their returning Savior.

Atahualpas' father had prophesied of the coming of the Spanish, and told his sons not to resist them when they would arrive, but to receive them in peace. Obviously God had been preparing the Indians for the reception of the gospel, but the ones who arrived had other intentions besides showing the Indians the way of salvation. Hammond Innes wrote of Pizarro, "In the name of Christ, he destroyed a fruitful empire, bringing nothing but disaster, contributing nothing."

Nearly three centuries to the year after the Spanish conquered Peru and destroyed their grand civilization, Charles Darwin contemptuously referred to the Indians of South America as "savages", barely within the same species of man as himself (see Brown and Bowlby). While he was the guest of the bloody dictator Rosas in Argentina, Darwin thought that Rosas slaughter of the Indians would open up some fine grazing land for cattle. (see note to Chpt. One)

23. Jonathan Norton Leonard, Ancient America, Great Ages Of Man Series, Time-Life Books Editors, Rhett Austell Publisher, 1969, pp.123.

24. Silvanus G. Morley, The Ancient Maya, Stanford University Press, 1956.

25. Silvanus G. Morley, The Ancient Maya, Stanford University Press, Stanford Ca., 1956, pp.233-259, also Worlds Last Mysteries, pp.270-272.

26. Jacques Soustelle, The Daily Life of the Aztecs, translated from the French by Patrick O'Brien, Stanford University Press, 1961, pp. xv.

27. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva Espana, Mexico, 1950, pp.352-354, and from Hernan Cortez' own account.

28. As with the conquest of Peru, the Aztec King of Mexico, Montezuma, welcomed Cortez and his small band of soldiers warmly, thinking that he might be the return of their god. The Aztecs had seen a great, glowing light in the East for many months a few years before the coming of the Spaniards, and when they did arrive it was on the exact date that the Aztec calender said their god would return.

Although the end results were the same nearly twenty years before Pizarro's bloody coup, Cortez had not acted as treacherously as Pizarro, in fact he made every effort to encourage the Aztec Monarch to abandon his bloody religion of human sacrifice and become a Christian. Cortez was a man of iron, a warrior who had been trained as a lawyer in Spain, and had come to the new world, befriended Diego Columbus, brother of Christopher Columbus the great adventurer, and become a wealthy landowner on the island of Cuba by the age of thirty three. Still he yearned for adventure, and organized a fleet of ships to explore the interior of Mexico. He burned his company's ships after they landed on the mainland, lest any soldiers faint of heart might think of turning back. As they marched towards the Mexican capital, they heard rumors of the mighty Ruler of the land, Montezuma. Encountering Indian villages and towns along the way when approaching the Aztec capital Cortez and his men were horrified at the remains of fresh human sacrifices left on top of sacrificial alters on many of the temples, the hearts cut out of the living person and offered to the sun god and the bodies dismembered in these gory rites by priests with matted, filthy, blood soaked hair and clothes, with the smell of decayed flesh everywhere. In most of these cities Cortez and his men destroyed the idols and set up crosses. Cortez enlisted the aid of many of these Indian cities who were dissatisfied with the reign of the Aztecs and the constant demand for victims for their religion. Whenever there was a choice between war or diplomacy, Cortez always offered the olive branch of peace first, he was by all reports intensely religious and sought to convert the Indians.

When the Spanish conquistador approached the Aztec capital, Montezuma went out to meet him and presented him with presents of gold and silver and six thousand tapestries of finely woven cotton. The Aztec Emperor actually greeted Cortez by bowing to him, kissing the ground in front of him (Aztec subjects at that time were forbidden to even look Montezuma in the face when he went by, so this was an extraordinary act of humility on the Indian monarch's part), and literally giving him the keys to the Empire, addressing him thus: "Our lord, you are weary from the journey and tired, and now you have arrived here on earth to your city of Mexico to sit on your throne under it's awning. Our kings have guarded it until your return. This has been prophesied by the Kings who have governed this city of yours, you have come back to us from the sky to take possession of your royal home. Welcome to your land, my lords."

At the royal palace, Montezuma took Cortez by the hand and sat him on a throne cast with gold and precious gems, then made this amazing address to him: "We have known from of old from the records of our fathers, that myself and the inhabitants of this country are not descendants from the other natives here, but we were the children of strangers from a distant land, and that you are the descendant of our former King of that land there is no doubt. Thus you may be assured that we shall obey you as the ambassador of your great King, and all the land that you see before you is now at your disposal, and everything of ours is yours."

Apparently the priests and many of the ruling class objected to Montezuma so readily handing over the empire in one gesture, and they resented the loss of their privileges, they did not so easily desire to give away their entire Kingdom to a stranger, and plotted against Cortez. Cortez got wind of this and was aware of their danger. Hundreds of miles inland, inside of a vast empire, with the Aztec priests and nobility plotting against him, when he heard that two Spanish soldiers had been killed in one of the villages, he took Montezuma hostage, as much for his own safety as for anything else. He held him, but not for ransom, merely insisting that he stop the practice of human sacrifice. The Spanish soldiers had found Aztec temples where the walls and the idols were coated two and three fingers thick with dried human blood, the priest were not only cannibals, they were sodomites. Cortez preached to some of the Aztec lords and nobles on the benefits of Christianity, attempting to convert them. One speech was recorded that Cortez made to the priests in their own temple and is probably a typical example: "God Who made heaven and earth also made yourselves and us and every man. He grows what nourishes us. Thus if we have been good He will take us to heaven, and if not then we shall go to hell, as I will inform you in more detail when we can communicate better. Here where you have these idols I desire to put the images of the Lord and His Blessed Mother. Also bring water to wash these walls and we will take all this away."

Cortez had to leave the capital Tenochtitlan to attend to some business, at which time General Alvarado and his men slaughtered a thousand Mexicans at a sacred dance. The soldiers had panicked at rumors that they were to become sacrificial victims in the Aztecs bloody religion. At the same time, rival Spanish factions intent on arresting Cortez and claiming Mexico as their own had shown up off the coast.

When Cortez returned, things went from bad to worse, the Mexican nobles had secretly voted Montezuma out of office, the Spaniards were trapped inside the City, and sporadic street fighting between the Spanish and Mexicans occurred. Eventually Montezuma went and spoke to a crowd from a rooftop, encouraging them to accept the Spanish rule. The mob became unruly, and Montezuma was struck down and killed by his own people. Cortez was reported to have wept when informed of the death of the King. Thereafter the Spanish became engaged in a war with the Aztecs, enlisting the help of the surrounding tribes and conquering the Capital for Spain.

Of course the bloody human sacrifices, the offering of human hearts at the alter of the Sun god that the Aztecs practiced has been brought up as a justification for the Spaniards actions. In bringing a halt to this detestable practice we can see that there was some merit in that. Although the conquerors were horrified at this aspect of the Aztec religion, it should be borne in mind that this was a gross distortion of an originally pure religion, thus showing that the Aztec culture was not a recent development from more primitive beginnings, as modern archaeologists claim, but a degeneration and decadence from a previously highly religious and intellectual climate from an ancient past.

The Aztecs originally believed that although we are born with a physical heart, we had to acquire a new spiritual heart in order to enter into heaven. Irene Nicholson wrote: "The sacrifice of the youth was linked with a profound philosophical idea that only the true, the deified heart is worthy to become nourishment for the great star that maintains life on earth. The Nahua peoples believed that we are born with a physical heart and face, but that we have to create a deified heart and a true face. The ordinary word for heart was yollotl, a word derived from ollin, movement. Thus the ordinary human heart is the moving, pumping organ that keeps us alive; but the heart that can be made by special efforts in life is called Yoltcotl,or deified. The phrase used to describe the face that we must make if we are to be truly men is ixtli in yollotl, which signifies a process whereby heart and face must combine. The heart must shine through the face before our features become reliable reflections of ourselves."

"Thus heart-making and face-making, the growth of spiritual strength, were two aspects of a single process which was the aim of life and which consisted in creating some firm and enduring centre from which it would be possible to operate as human beings . . . If we are unable to create this second heart and face, we are merely vagrants on the face of the earth. The idea of vagrancy is expressed in the word ahuicpa, which means literally 'to carry something untowardly.'"

Nicholson quotes a Nahua poet here,
" . . .you give your heart to each thing in turn
Carrying you do not carry it.
You destroy your heart on the earth
Are you not always pursuing things idly?"

Could this be what the ancient Aztec mystics understood with the vision of the eagle grasping the serpent in it's claws, representing the intellect or the soul's victory over the desires of the flesh?

Nicholson proceeded: "But of course this idea of feeding the sun with a symbolic heart, created within a man's psyche, was very soon distorted. Offerings to the gods made in flowers picked from the meadows and the cornfields became offerings of enemy hearts torn out. . .The whole gory process is a long way from the Nahua ideal of creating the heart Yolteotl, or of the Maya idea . . .described by Domingo Martinez Paradez: ' . . .So in Maya anthropogeny there exists the concept not only that consciousness is given to man, but also that it must be formed, and it is the god's task to do this.'"

Nicholson continues, "This is the central idea and purpose of the Quetzalcoatl or plumed serpent myth, for Nanautzin is one manifestation of Quetzalcoatl. He is the plumed serpent in his lowliest state, but his self-sacrifice saves the universe from extinction and opens up latent possibilities not only for the heavenly bodies but also for man." (Irene Nicholson,Mexican and Central American Mythology, Paul Hamlyn, London, New York, 1967, pp.74-75.

It has been reported that the Aztecs had a primitive tradition of monotheism before they fell into the polytheistic worship of many gods, which flies directly in the face of Darwin's evolutionary ideas that religion was the product of primitive nature worship that gradually evolved into polytheism and only later developed into monotheism. A truly accurate analysis will reveal that just the opposite is the case in most cultures, there was an original high concept of God as a unique, all powerful and invisible being who created all things, and gradually there was a degeneration into the worship of many gods, and finally into the debased forms of idol worship and spiritism that we find in the final, decadent form.

We know that the legendary King Nezaualcoyotl had set up and dedicated a sanctuary to "the unknown god, the creator of all things . . . he by whom we live." This god was supreme above all of the lesser gods. At the top of this temple were nine stories, standing for the nine heavens, and at the top was the tenth story, with the outside painted like a starry heaven, and the inside was decorated with precious gems, gold, and elaborate feathers, but there was no idol there to represent the god whom no man had "ever seen or known." (Ixtilxochitl,Historia Chichimeca, pp.130, Mexico, 1892.

Of the Aztec religion in it's latter, degenerate stages, Nicholson informs us that the priests developed a secret lore that concerned the use of drugs in their rituals, and they became spiritualists and sorcerers, She quotes the Spanish writer Acosta who wrote, " . . .by means of this ointment they (the priests) became witches, and saw and spoke to the devil. The priests, when smeared with this ointment, lost all fear and became imbued with cruelty. So they boldly killed men in their sacrifices . . ." The priests were also to preform magic healings while in a state of trance "so the people went to the priests and holy men, who encouraged the blind and ignorant in this error, persuading them what they pleased in making them pursue their inventions and diabolic ceremonies . . .'"

Nicholson wrote: "This is a far cry from Quetzacoatl, who could not bear to hurt any living thing. But if priests had lost all sense of responsibility, the degeneration is easily explained. As the idea of feeding the sun symbolically with 'hearts made god' became taken literally, so the use of special drugs would fortify the cruelty instead of acting as an adjunct to purifying of emotional life. (Ibid) pp.70.

Jacques Soustelle informs us "There is no aspect of the Mexican civilization that shocks our feelings as much as this. From the first contact between the Indians and the Europeans the horror and disgust that the newcomers felt for the human sacrifices helped them to convince themselves that the native religion came from hell . . .The Spaniards, so sincerely moved by the cruelty of the native priests, nevertheless massacred, burnt, mutilated and tortured with a perfectly clear conscience."

What we see in the deterioration of the Aztec religion was what had taken place in the pagan nations surrounding Israel, and what was specifically prohibited by God in the Old Testament. Nicholson wrote, "The secret lore of the priest cast, which understood how to manipulate these drugs, was handed down from father to son . . .The use and abuse of hallucinogens may provide a clue to the perplexing riddle of the degeneration of the ancient cultures; for it is evident that the religion of Quetzacoatl, the original one of redemption and mercy, had become completely perverted by the time the Spanish armies arrived in the New World. The soldiers were not unnaturally horrified by the mass human sacrifices and the superstitious adoration of a proliferation of gods and goddesses, some of whom appeared to be more properly demons." (Nicholson, pp.70)

Spiritism, gnosticism, channeling, contacting the dead, were all specifically prohibited in the Bible, and for good reason. We are surrounded by a spiritual world of good angels and fallen angels, and we as humans do not have the power or wisdom to know the difference. Attempts to "talk to angels" is extremely dangerous, for we don't know if we are contacting a diabolical angel with a friendly face, until it may be too late. Today's friendly psychic may be tomorrow's necromancer. You may get friendly advice on your love life from some "spiritual guide," but this is exactly how the fall of man occurred, a perfectly innocent woman began talking to a fallen, malignant, evil and powerful being, a being who had once sang before the throne of God, an ancient and fallen angel who posed as a "spiritual adviser" and deceived our first parents into disobeying God, thus forfeiting their spiritual and physical lives in the outcome, as well as the lives of the entire human race since.

I believe that at this time, at least since the Flood of Noah, ordinary men and women are protected in a special way by God from unwitting contact by these beings. The angels loyal to God are more numerous and powerful than the rebellious ones, and a good angel would not wish to dole out advice on our love life or the stock market, good angels would not do anything but direct our attention to the Scriptures and Jesus Christ, in other words they do not wish to manifest themselves unless directly instructed by God Himself for some important purpose. The Bible says that even the devil himself "transforms himself into an angel of light" in order to deceive, if possible, even the elect. The Word of God also says that in the last days would come men spreading the "doctrines of demons," but that even were an angel from heaven to appear with "another gospel"besides that given in and only in the Bible, let him be accursed. This is repeated twice in context, showing the severity of believing anything other than the Bible. We are to believe the Bible, all of the Bible, and nothing more than the Bible. Any religion that claims to have sprung from some man having a vision of an angel, or even claiming to have talked to the Lord Himself, if it involves an extra revelation after the final book of Revelation was written by St. John, or if it is some newly discovered ancient writings seen through a seers stone adding an "extra gospel" to the Holy Bible, it is to be soundly avoided.

It would appear that some pagan nations, perhaps more than just a few, (not "all nations", as I previously had written) had an original very lofty concept of God, possibly handed down from Noah to his sons, that was gradually corrupted as different nations spread over the face of the earth, with the Hebrew nation alone possessing the pure and full revelation of God (by full revelation I man that at any one point in Israel's history they had God's full revelation up to that time) as He revealed HImself to their prophets, through which nation the Messiah came.

We need to come to the foot of the cross for salvation. Only the incarnation of the Son of God, and the shedding of His precious blood on the cross, can save us from the penalty of inherited sin and of the sin that we also have committed, "for there is no man who sinneth not," but "the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin." The precious Lamb of God was sent by the Father to take our place on the cross of calvary to save a fallen and helpless mankind, so that you and I, by repentance and faith in Jesus, may be forgiven of our sins and delivered from eternal hellfire. The Bible says, "If any man (woman) be in Christ, he is a new creation, old things are passed away, all things are become new." We are born again through faith in Christ Jesus and His death, burial and resurrection, by the water of the Word of God and the filling of the Holy Spirit. Any revelation or spiritual experience outside of the Word of God is extremely dangerous, and could cost you your soul. This is why seeking visions and consulting psychics is not such a good idea, for "there is only one name under heaven by which men might be saved," so that "at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

Soustelle wrote that the Aztec concept, before it was debased, was very akin to what we find in our Christian idea of a kinsman redeemer, however it had been grossly distorted over time from it's original noble idea. He wrote:"Human sacrifice among the Mexicans was inspired neither by cruelty nor by hatred . . .Blood was necessary to save this world and the men in it; the victim was no longer an enemy who was to be killed but a messenger, arrayed in a dignity that was almost divine, who was sent to the gods. All of the relevant descriptions . . .convey the impression not of a dislike between the sacrificer and the victim nor of anything resembling a lust for blood, but of a strange fellow-feeling or rather-and this is vouched for by the texts-of a kind of mystical kinship.

Sahagun wrote "When a man took a prisoner he said, "Here is my well beloved son." and the captive said, "Here is my revered father'" (Jacques Soustelle, The Daily Life of the Aztecs,Trans. From the French by Patrick O'Brien, Stanford Univ. Press, 1970, pp.98-99.

The North American Indians were waiting for the gospel of Christ to set them free spiritually also. It is interesting that many Indians tribes in North America, were already expecting the arrival of men from the East who would bring them the knowledge of God when Catholic Missionaries arrived. Circling Raven of the Cour De Alene tribe in the Bitterroot mountains of Northern Idaho prophesied of the coming of the black robes who would come one day to bring them the knowledge of the one God, thus when Catholic priest showed up the Indians welcomed them, in fact the Indians of that tribe even sent out messengers to encourage missionaries to come and teach them the Word of God. The priests met with much success, but the story was not always the same in other parts of the world.

God had entrusted the Spanish nation along with the other European nations, with a great responsibility, carrying the redemptive message of the cross to the rest of the world. Those who should have shared God's love enslaved and devastated many cultures instead of evangelizing them. The story has been repeated with the British colonialization of India, the Portuguese in Brazil, the Dutch and English in Africa, even the English in North America. European nations, enriched with the blessings of Christianity, entrusted with the mission to spread the message of the gospel of Christ's love to the nations of the world, instead used their position and affluence given to them by God to enrich themselves at the expense of the very people they were meant to serve.

Of course, without the moderating influence of the gospel to curb mens' greed and lust for power, the situation would have been much worse, if that is even imaginable. Wherever we find the imperialists with their dreams of glory and wealth to be attained at the expense of the natives, we also find a dedicated assemblage of missionaries who accompanied them, whose goals were much different than those of the conquerers, and who bravely fought for the rights, for the dignity, and for the salvation of those whom they felt they were meant to minister to. History is replete with stories of those filled with faith and the fervor of Gods' love for the native cultures, who heroically laid down their lives in establishing educational institutions, hospitals, churches and missions for the various cultures that they came in contact with.

It is the same today with America, we are only a small part of the worlds population yet we use an overabundance of the earths resources, our original destiny of being a light to the nations has been perverted into the selfish pursuit of the "American Dream" of every man accumulating as much wealth as he can for himself. Material prosperity was always meant to be secondary to spiritual prosperity, but now in the name of consumerism we have made material success a god.

America was originally founded in the Divine Providence of God Himself to be a New Zion in the Wilderness, but she has changed from being the New Zion to present day Babylon, the drunken harlot treading on the blood of the saints. Through greed and pride; she has fallen, she has fallen. Although she sits on the heads of ancient European monarchy, when that ancient beast power re-awakens it will devour her. Now she says, "I am, and there is no other," the day will come when her lovers, the princes and kings and merchants of the earth will bemoan her, that great city that did sit in the midst of the seas will be brought to nothing if she does not repent, as Hosea's wife. America has been bought with a price, and has turned to harlotry. A sign of wickedness in the Old Testament prophet's book was a bushel carried by a woman, a measuring basket for wheat. America was once termed the "breadbasket of the world."

Someday this nation will be judged along with other nations; we shall be judged for the farmland wasted with the billions of dollars we have spent on a worthless crop, tobacco, when we could have used this land to grow crops to feed children that are starving in other countries of the world. The money we have squandered on gambling, alcohol, and entertainment will cry out against us in the last days when we could have fed and clothed the world, spiritually first, yes, but materially as well. Like the rich man Dives we have lived deliciously while poor Lazarus nations have begged at our gates and we have thrown them only a few crumbs.

29. The Last of the Conquistadors, Junipero Serra, by Omer Englebert, Translated from the French by Katherine Woods, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956, pp.9-31. Imprimatur: Gregorio Alfaro, Viv. Gen. Baja California, 31 de Mayo, 1954.

30. Communication from the Turkish Embassy Regarding Piri Reis, Turkish Embassy, Washington D.C., Jan., 28, 1965, to Mr.Robert L. Merritt, Attorney at Law, Hippodrome Building, Cleveland 14, Ohio, from Ali Suat Cakir, Second Secretary of the Turkish Embassy.

31. Hapgood, Charles, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Chilton Pub., N.Y.1966. In his earlier book, The Earth's Shifting Crust, Professor Hapgood propounds his theory of a lost, highly developed, technically advanced, world-wide civilization that was suddenly wiped out by a global catastrophe. The forward to that book was written by his friend, Albert Einstein, who supported Hapgood in his views.

32. (ibid)

33. In the Historie (first published in Italy in 1571) written by the great explorers' son, Ferdinand Columbus, this relative was said to be Bernardo Pallastrelli, the husband of his wife's paternal aunt, Phillipa Muniz, however according to the genealogical records of Count Bernardo Pallastrelli (2d ed., Piacenza, 1876) Felipa Moniz was the daughter of Isabella Moniz and Bartolomeo Pallastrelli, an Italian immigrant who took up residence in Portugal at Prince Henry's court. Perhaps both stories are true. If Bernardo/Bartholomeo married twice and named his daughter after his wife, or perhaps if, given the custom at that time for long Latin names, Isabella might have been Phillipa and named her daughter after herself, this would be a logical explanation.

Another story told by Gomara (1552) is that an old seaman came to stay with Columbus and that before he died he told Columbus of his adventures sailing in the West.

34. Hammond Innes, The Conquistadors, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1969, pp.23-24.

35. King John exhibited extreme xenophobia towards foreigners, he even had a number of his own nobility arrested, and executed Fernando ll, Duke of Braganca in 1484. While King he personally stabbed Diego, duke of Viseu.

36. Steibeing has tried to discount some of Hapgood's research by bringing up some of the discrepancies of the Piri Reis map, discrepancies admitted by Hapgood since Reis made his maps from more ancient ones and did not have the knowledge in 1521 of horizontal and spherical trigonometry required to accurately position everything that he copied down when collating his material. Still, Reis' identified parts of the coastline of Antarctica three centuries before the continent was officially discovered. Just as astounding are the representations of the entire continent shown in the correct latitudinal and longitudinal position with the mountains and coastlines well placed in the Finneas map from roughly the same period, mountains and coastlines that have been under two miles of ice for thousands of years and only within the past fifty years mapped by sonar readings!

Captain Lorenzo W. Burroughs, Chief of the Cartographic Section of the USAF 8th Reconnaissance Technical Sqdn., of Westover Air Force Base, Massachusetts wrote to Hapgood on August 14, 1961, "The solution of the portolano projection used by Admiral Piri Reis, developed by your class in Anthropology, must be very nearly correct; for when known geographic locations are checked in relationship to the grid computed by Mr. Richard W. Strachan (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who worked with Hapgood on the maps), there is remarkably close agreement . . . It is our opinion that those who compiled the original map had an excellent knowledge of the continents covered by this map. As stated by Colonel Harold Z Ohlmerer . . .the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, appears to be truly represented in the southern sector of the Piri Reis Map. The agreement of the Piri Reis Map with the seismic profile of this area made by the Norwegian-British-Swedish Expedition of 1949, supported by your solution of the grid,places beyond a reasonable doubt the conclusion that the original source maps must have been made before the present Antarctic ice cap covered the Queen Maud Land coasts."

"It is our opinion that the accuracy of the cartographic features shown in the Oranteus Fineas Map (1531) suggests, beyond a doubt, that it also was compiled from accurate source maps of Antarctica, but in this case of the entire continent. Close examination has proved the original source maps must have been compiled at a time when the land mass and inland waterways of the continent were relatively free from ice. This conclusion is further supported by a comparison of the Oronteus Fineas Map with the results obtained by International Geophysical Year teams in their measurements of the sub glacial topography. The comparison also suggests that the original source maps (compiled in remote antiquity) were prepared when Antarctica was presumably free of ice. The Cordiform Projection used by Oronteus Fineas suggests the use of advanced mathematics. Further, the shape given to the Antarctic continent suggests the possibility, of not probability, that the original source maps were compiled on a stereographic or gnomonic type of projection, (involving the use of spherical trigonometry)."

"We are convinced that the findings made by you and your associates are valid, and that they raise extremely important questions affecting geology and ancient history, questions which certainly require further investigation. We thank you for extending us the opportunity to have participated in the study of these maps. The following officers and airmen volunteered their time to assist Captain Lorenzo W. Burroughs in this evaluation: Captain Richard E. Covault, CWO Howard D. Minor, Msgt Clifton M. Dover, MSgt David C. Carter, TSgt James H. Hood, SSgt James L. Carroll, and ALC Don R. Vance."

Lorenzo W. Burroughs
Captain, USAF
Chief, Cartographic Section
8th Reconnaissance Technical Sqdn (SAC)
Westover Air Force Base, Massachusetts

Another letter of the sixth of July, 1960 from Harold Z. Ohlmeyer, Lt. Colonel, USAF, Commander at Westover Air Force Base to Professor Hapgood read:

"Your request for evaluation of certain unusual features of the Piri Reis World Map of 1513 by this organization has been reviewed."

"The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land Antarctic, and the Palmer Peninsula is reasonable. We find this is the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map . . .this indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice cap. The ice cap in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on the map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographic knowledge in 1513." Both correspondences recorded in Hapgood's book "'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.'"

Evolutionists tell us that Antarctica has been covered by a glacial ice cap for millions of years. This is impossible in the light of current evidence that maps, probably made within the last ten to fifteen thousand years, were used to make inferior copies of in the middle ages, showing what the continent looked like before it was covered with ice. In addition, these ancient people had very advanced knowledge of spherical trigonometry to have made the maps, and must have colonized Antarctica when it had a temperate climate. This should not be so surprising, since we are supposed to believe that North America has had four ice ages, all within the past million years, the last one being barely twelve thousand years ago, and no (evolutionary) scientist has any really good answer as to what caused those ice ages.

Steibeing's unwarranted criticisms of Hapgood's results stem perhaps from his ignorance of cartographic methods. I do not claim to have any advanced education in this field myself, but obviously the above quoted reliable authorities agreed with Hapgood's findings. Another complaint of Steibeing's was that ancient mariners never sailed very far beyond the straights of Hercules, which argument is ludicrous. Hapgood noted in his book that Professor A.W. Brogger addressed an international congress of archaeologists at Oslo in 1936, where he spoke on the subject of a previous "Golden Age" of sea navigation as long ago as three thousand years B.C., with the age of the Phoenicians only representing the last stages of the decline of that culture. Brogger's ideas were treated soberly and with respect by the great gathering of scientists.

I believe that many traditional archaeologists, schooled in the drab, evolutionary school of thinking, exhibit a form of extreme Euro-centricism, as well as what I would term, Pale-agoraphobia, they do not wish to believe that older cultures other than our own, from other parts of the globe, could have developed such advanced and extensive civilized communities, or have made journeys to explore the entire world. This represents a modernist, ethnic bias found not only in Darwin's writings but continuing on with the writings of the present crop of evolutionists.

37. (ibid) pp.308.The Bible said that before the Flood of Noah there existed a race of "giants" with great strength and intellect, and there are indications from Scripture that some of their descendants may have still existed after the Flood.

A: (Section 1 of the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata. Kisari Mohan Ganguli, tr. [1883-1896])
It is incontrovertible that the dalits in India have been an oppressed and persecuted group, and the caste system has been unfairly applied to those not of the Brahmin and Kshatrya classes, however the caste system was originally set up for the betterment of all classes of society, for humans to work together in harmony, each having their respective duties and status, provided it is not abused and human rights and dignity are respected, which unfortunately was not always the case in India. After all, in a purely egalitarian society (a pure democracy, which essentially means mob rule) where all are meant to be socially and economically equal, unless this was brutally enforced such as happened in communist totalitarian systems, there will always be those who excel more and there will be those who excel less. This is an undeniable fact of life. As the Lord said "The poor you have with you always".
Certain people seem to be either born or bred to leadership; they are meant to assume positions of power and responsibility; it is in their nature. Others are not interested or simply not capable of assuming those positions. And with that power there will also be certain privileges given to those in positions of authority in order to accommodate them in the fulfillment of their duties; access to classified information, special security in the manner of personal guards such as our Secret Service; housing would be provided; they would have freedom from some of the encumbrances of normal job related work outside of their governmental duties and not be encumbered with domestic duties; those would be taken care of by a staff of trained professionals; there should be special travel arrangements for foreign and domestic appointments, etc. etc. And a ruler should actually be trained for the job; ideally this should take years; in addition, for a ruler to be able to enact long lasting policy, the American system of a mere four years seems like too brief of a time for this to happen. How can the other nations of the world depend on any consistent policy emanating from a powerful nation when every four years the nation is convulsed in a schizophrenic pavane that resembles as much as anything a contest between two or more rival side-show carnival barkers trying to out hucksterize each other while making fantastic and unrealistic promises to their incredulous audience (the unwitting voters who are promised miraculous solutions to the varied troubles we all face in this life, as if some political candidate holds the magic power to do all of this), the outcome of which can radically change the country's political position on everything from foreign policy to parental rights over their children's decision to have a life changing surgery (abortion).
And politicians make these glib promises as though they can actually grant happiness to the average Joe citizen, as though economic prosperity is the only element that lends validity to the human condition. But to make the American dream of financial achievement the ultimate goal of every citizen puts an undue onus on those who simply aren't going to make it through clawing and scratching to the top of the dog-pile. To make financial prosperity the be-all and end-all of human existence limits the human experience to groping after the chimeras produced by greed and blind social ambition.
But the human spirit was created for greater things than this; we are meant to seek after spiritual excellence, as Christ said, "See first the kingdom of God, and then all these things shall be added to you."
With a purely material outlook on life, with the motto "He who has the most toys wins", it is as if somebody were to fire a starting pistol, with a mad dash by everyone to get to the finish line first while leaving those who fell behind to fend for themselves in the ultimate fulfillment of Darwin's brutal law of "survival of the fittest".
Indeed, this was one of the causes of the terrible factory abuses in England and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when we had a new "ruling class" of venture capitalists who were suddenly thrown into power and who had not been sufficiently tutored or brought up to understand their responsibility to society that goes along with wielding that power; although these abuses were also as much the fault of some of the religious Calvinist's and the materialistic philosophers who equated "progress" with virtue, as they were of the Darwinian capitalists who saw in Darwin and Spencer's idea of "survival of the fittest" a fine justification to exploit the workers from whose sweat and toil they made their millions.
All members of society have equal worth and are equally loved by God. To recognize this would quench the fires of class envy that are currently raging out of control every few years in our country, which are always being stoked by the liberals to gain the allegiance of their devoted masses, who if kept in a state of continual dissatisfaction by their democratic demagogues are then pliable enough to have their passions whipped up every few years before lining up at the voting booths to ensure that those same democratic overlords stay in power. In Darwin and Marx's viewpoint the classes of society are engaged in an endless struggle for power with each other, until in Darwin's viewpoint one of those classes is exterminated while in Marx's view all class distinctions will have been obliterated, and if this does not happen naturally, then it must be enforced by the iron fist bearing the hammer and the sickle. But in a just society, the classes cooperate with each other, each tending faithfully to their role and protecting and nurturing each other. In a just society, one may be born in a lesser class, and through effort, ingenuity and service rise to the highest office in the land, and opportunity should be provided for all for this goal.
The primary goal of human life is not exclusively economic progress with an ever greater store of accumulated things (although a sound economy and wealth gotten by honest labor are not to be despised), but moral and spiritual progress - humility, meekness, kindness, justice, mercy, righteousness - these are the hallmarks of a civilized society, and ultimately we are meant to glorify God, and endeavor to establish a stable and more compassionate civilization, with the garlands of virtue and humility bedecking our souls. Riches are not an evil in themselves, but when sought out exclusively apart from their usefulness for the kingdom of God, they can become a great impediment to civic virtue.

To return to our original topic: There are two views among Christians regarding pagan religions. One is that all of these religions are occultic in origin and are the spawn of the devil, and that there is absolutely nothing of value to be found in them. This was the viewpoint of the Catholic priests when they encountered the Mayan civilization and they destroyed many of their cherished tablets recording their history and their sacred knowledge. There is much to support this viewpoint, in the fact that the priests from the church had witnessed many of the horrific practices of the Meso-American tribes with their ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism, which their bloodthirsty gods demanded as regular tribute. Indeed, the Bible states that the gods of the heathen are idols, which in another translation is worded demons. Many of the gods of the Mayans were undoubtedly diabolic, and the priests were concerned for the safety of the souls of those whom God had commended to their charge and their zeal was prompted by good and pure motives. The English word "devil" comes from the Hindu word "deva", which is the word used in their language for any one of the numerous gods inhabiting their celestial pantheon.
Thus we have the Old Testament prohibition against worshiping "the host of heaven", i.e. fallen angels and spirits of wickedness in high places.
The other viewpoint is that, although much of what is found in pagan religions is unprofitable and even dangerous spiritually, some of these ancient religions are deviations, distortions of the truer revelation given to their fathers, handed down from the time of Noah, and which he received from the patriarchs before the Flood. It would seem that in the Hindu tradition there was definitely a seeking after the truth among their ancient sages. The Upanishads are for the most part philosophical discourses on the nature of God and the soul of man, and the interrelationship between the two. The Vedas are earlier hymns composed to worship various tribal gods and goddesses. These are not on a par with the revelation of the Word of God, however they do represent an attempt to understand man's place in the universe, and they are definitely theistic in nature - this universe was no mere accident of chance in the minds of the ancient Hindus. One thing we should not do is impune the motives of these ancient yogis purely on the basis that they did not understand God's providential ways in the same manner as ancient Israel did or as modern Christians do. As stated, these men were seeking after the truth. In a sense, some of them may have been "holy men". They did not take the easy route in life. Religion for them was not some kind of Sunday picnic - it was a way of life. And they incorporated their belief into every aspect of their daily lives so that even a common meal had a sacred meaning. Nothing, not even a small insect that crawled along the ground, was any less important in the eyes of God than the stars that came out at night were. Life was filled with meaning and purpose for them, because God had created this universe and impregnated it with life and instilled within it part of His essence. Their doctrine of ahimsa - nonviolence to any living animate thing - is one that could be imitated by any people or culture on the face of the earth.
The ancient Hindus were also "pro-life". In the sacred Laws of ancient India killing an embryo was a grave sin, tantamount to killing a Brahmana: "Killing a Kshatriya or Vaisya engaged in a sacrifice, or a woman in her courses, or a pregnant woman, or a woman (of the Brâhmana caste) who has bathed after temporary uncleanness[1], or an embryo of unknown sex, or one come for protection, are crimes equal to the crime of killing a Brâhmana." (Vaishnava Dharmasâstra, or Vishnu-smriti, Chapter XXXVI, No. 1, THE INSTITUTES OF VISHNU, Translated by Julius Jolly, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 7 Oxford, the Clarendon Press [1880] ).
Abortion was also considered a great crime in the national epic of India, the Mahabharata: "The learned man who recites to other this Veda of Vyasa reapeth advantage. It may without doubt destroy even the sin of killing the embryo and the like." (First part of the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata)
They put a much higher value on human life in that respect than our culture does today.
Understanding that man was created by God, we do not own our own bodies, but we are the property of the creator and as such are meant to live lives of purity and sanctity.
It was also the duty of the King (or his ministers in various parts of the Kingdom) to provide for the poor and needy, as long as they were living a pure and godly life, so that they would not perish from want, and to protect the assets of children and destitute women, the feeble and the helpless, the blind and the lame. (Vaishnava Dhamasâstra, Chapter III, No. 65, 79, 80 [Institutes of Vishnu]) He was even meant to show kindness to criminals condemned to capital punishment for their crimes (ibid, No. 90). In other words, although it was understood that the King was to have a bountiful treasury, it was also understood that in one way this treasury was like the "national budget". It was to be used for the administration of the Kingdom and the benefit of the citizens: "[Let him appoint] pious persons for performing acts of piety [such as bestowing gifts on the indigent, and the like](No.17), and the ministers whom the King appointed were to be "pure, free from covetousness" (No.71) and those who administered justice were to be impartial and not prone to being corrupted by foreign interests and lobbyists attempting to gain influence through catering to their lusts and greed (No. 74). (this sounds very much like the qualification for a bishop in the New Testament; character and morality do matter in politics, at least according to the ancient Hindus); One class of society that the treasury was not to be squandered on were "unworthy persons", persons not necessarily of dishonorable reputation, but not worthy of being sustained by the public funds, and these are mentioned as "dancers, eulogists, bards, and the like", i.e. actors, poets, professional entertainers, artists, (except those specifically hired by the government for the adornment of palace and public works) they should be able to make their own living out in the world just like ditch diggers do. (No. 54)
He also had the right to appoint spies to know the state of affairs in his Kingdom and in those of neighboring Kingdoms, and he had the duty to protect his country against any foreign or domestic enemies; to punish any who would seek to sow seeds of subversion among any in his realm, or in neighboring realms of allies, and "when he has been attacked by his foe, let him protect his own realm to the best of his power." (National Security and Homeland Defense) (No. 34, 35, 43).
The primary duty of a King was to protect his people (No. 1) i.e. "to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare", and he is to administer justice (No. 90, 91), to honor the righteous and punish the unrighteous (No. 36, 37), and he is to respect the practices and customs of neighboring Kingdoms that he has conquered and honor their royal seed (No. 42, 47, 53), unless they be of ignoble descent (this could mean when a corrupt, wicked family is established in a neighboring Kingdom (Iraq 2003) and the line of descent should be replaced). Some of their values might raise some eyebrows in modern society; for instance a man who was slain while protecting the life of his wife or a cow would automatically go to heaven. Equating the life of a cow with the life of a spouse would not go over very well in today's world. In addition, the crime of sodomy and the crime of having sex with a cow were equally reprehensible and had identical punishments, although in the Hebrew law both the man and the cow would be slain, while in the ancient Hindu law the man merely had to offer a sacrifice for atonement, while there is no mention of any punishment meted out to his bovine domestic partner.

Their ancient sages, through their practice of tapas (austerity) and samadhi (deep thought) were seeking prajna (wisdom); they were seeking to know who God was, and they sought to know the purpose and destiny of man. There is nothing unworthy in this and we have to admire them for their efforts. As our Lord said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled". The writers of the Upanishads realized that God was omniscient, omnipresent, immaterial, and the source of all creation, in which all things dwelt, but who was not necessarily identified with the things of his creation, and that he dwelt in the heart of man, and nowhere is this more clearly elucidated than in the Mundaka Upanishad. Still a hint of the gradual slide toward pantheism is also evident, and their description of God sounds sort of like the "force" in Star Wars: impersonal, emotionless, lacking in the familiar qualities that we understand in the Judeao-Christian God, such as compassion, justice, righteousness, concern for the poor and the widow, a God who desires us to have fellowship with Him and who answers prayers. Lacking knowledge of the true God, they sought after idols and false gods, and over the centuries their religion became very corrupt, much like what had happened in Central and South America, and they began to worship animals, rats and monkeys and cows, as gods and the life of a cow became more important than the welfare of the homeless and the poor, and it became more important to feed the rat gods than it was to care for a sudra who was created in the image of God, and the basic precepts of equal justice for all and concern for the poor and the downtrodden in society were cast aside for strange temple rites and bestial ceremonies that shocked many of the early missionaries who traveled to that land in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their original concept of salvation consisted of gaining moksha, or release from rebirth through eradicating carnal desire and attaining union with God. It was a noble concept and a noble aspiration. But it is not the gospel, and without Christ it will not lead to salvation. 

^Here It is also evident from even a cursory reading of these texts that much of what is found in Buddhism; the phraseology, the ascetic ideal, freedom from rebirth through eradicating desire, the master/student question/answer dialogue format of the sutras with heavenly enlightened beings who are showered with praise while being supplicated by mortal beings for answers to complex philosophical questions, listing the various components of the body to show that it is wholly undesirable - were all borrowed from ancient Hinduism and then given an atheistic spin that also denied the reality of the atman, or soul.
Siddhartha, who became the Buddha, was an Indian prince of the Shakya clan who lived in northern India near the beginning of the fifth century B.C. It had been prophesied when he was born that when he reached adulthood he would either become a world-conquering king or else he would renounce the world and seek the religious life. His wealthy father, concerned about the future of his kingdom, with Siddhartha being the heir apparent, wished to shield him from anything that might disillusion him with the pleasures of being a king, and surrounded him with every kind of enticement in order to enamor him with the delights of this world. Siddhartha grew up with the proverbial golden spoon in his mouth, and was unacquainted with ordinary human suffering.
It is told that one day when he had reached adulthood he left his palace and went out into his kingdom, against the wishes of his father. While out surveying the people, he saw three things that he had never seen before: a sick person, a dying person, and a dead person. Siddhartha was profoundly shocked upon seeing this, since he had never been permitted to be around human suffering during his entire life.
His attendant told him that this was the common lot of all humanity, and that some day he himself would also grow old, become infirm, and die.
Finally he saw a wandering religious mendicant who radiated peace and serenity. Struck by the vanity of riches and realizing that the fleeting pleasures of his life would someday come to an end, he renounced his kingdom and set out as a mendicant himself to seek truth, or deliverance from old age and death through enlightenment.
After practicing severe austerities for six years, one night he sat under a tree and meditated all night. When morning arrived he had become "enlightened", hence his title "Buddha" (this is very similar to the Prometheus myth), and believed that he understood the truth of existence through realizing the Four Noble Truths, the foundation of all later Buddhism:
1) All of life is ultimately suffering (dukkha),
all pleasures come to an end, beauty
fades, friendships dissolve, riches fade away.
2) Desire for pleasure causes this suffering.
3) Eradicate desire and suffering eventually vanishes.
4) The noble eightfold path leads to the end of desire.

In the following commentary on Buddhism, I am not endorsing it as a belief system; I am merely describing it's basic tenets in order to better analyze its faults and deficiencies later on in this article. Those of you who are looking for ultimate truth in Buddhism will be disappointed in this life, and will be lost for eternity in the next life. The only way to the Father is through Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Siddhartha did not necessarily come upon the Four Noble Truths suddenly on the night of his enlightenment, as the mythologists who chronicled his life would have us believe, but there was a definite progression in his thought throughout his life that led to their formulation.
The First Truth, that all of life is suffering, was obviously realized, by his own testimony, when he was still a wealthy young prince and he saw a sick person, an old person, and a dead person while traveling through his Kingdom, hence the First Truth was what it was that drove him to seek the forest life in the first place. He was beginning to get disillusioned about the pleasures of life long before his quest for enlightenment.
The Second and Third Truths, that suffering is caused by desire and that through abandoning desire one could end suffering were also very well known axioms for the ascetic life in India at that time. We find the same teaching in the Bhagavad Gita and the Dharma Sutras of the Hindus. There were numerous yogis in Buddha's day who believed this and were attempting to free themselves from desire to attain liberation from rebirth, so this was nothing very original springing from the mind of Siddhartha.

The idea that Siddhartha had never even contemplated the spiritual life before he saw the wandering religious mendicant and that he was totally caught up in the pleasures of this life is also a stretch. By his own testimony Siddhartha was practicing mysticism while he was a youth, entering into trances and mystical states long before he renounced his kingdom and set out on the road to enlightenment: "I thought: 'I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then -- quite withdrawn from sensuality, withdrawn from unskillful mental qualities -- I entered & remained in the first jhana: rapture & pleasure born from withdrawal, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation. Could that be the path to Awakening?' " (Majjhima Nikaya 36 Maha-Saccaka Sutta, The Longer Discourse to Saccaka, Translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.)
Probably the unique thing about Buddhism would be the Fourth Noble Truth, the way to end suffering, it's high standard of morals and the Mahayana ideal of universal compassion and selfless service for others, which next to the Christian model probably comprises the highest type of altruistic thought of any pagan religion.

There is a certain amount of truth to what the Buddhists are saying; they present a philosophic query concerning man's existence that partially describes our situation, but this partial truth, and the solution that they provide, can lead one down a dangerous path to spiritual perdition unless one has tasted the truth of the gospel.

The First Noble Truth of Buddhism, that we live in a world of suffering, is undeniable. We live in a fallen world, not the world that God originally intended, which was to be free of sin, sickness, old age and death.

The Second Noble Truth, that suffering is caused by (unwholesome) desire is also true (to a certain extent). Buddha was right in a way. Desire does cause suffering. Not all desire would be bad, certainly not the desire to help out somebody else, or the desire for wisdom and knowledge. But carnal and selfish desire would be the culprits. Look at the damage caused by lust, pornography, alcohol, gambling, drug abuse, greed in corporate and government officials throughout the world, that are all the results of lust and desire. Look at all the heartache and misery in your own life that desire for illegitimate things or for things you could not acquire, or else desire for things you could obtain that did not bring happiness at the expense of caring for others has brought about. The original cause of our suffering was Eve's unwholesome desire for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which caused her to disobey God, which brought on sin, which we all inherited, and which brought on more suffering.

Turning away from sin and selfish desire (and thus being more compassionate and sharing one's assets with others), the Third Noble Truth, ends future suffering and would make the world a much better place today.

Unfortunately, the way to turn from sin, confession and repentance and faith in Jesus Christ for our atonement, forgiveness and the new life in Christ are lacking in the Fourth Noble Truth. Denying God and His providence, the southern Buddhists have settled for a dialectic form of psychological nihilism; they reject prayer, they do not believe in the concept of sacrificial redemption by God for man's sins, and they believe that it is purely by our own actions instead of by the mercy of God that we can be delivered from the consequences of sin, and of sinful actions.

Thus if you have really "blown it" in Buddhism, lost your temper, fallen into some kind of immorality, said something bad about the Buddha or his teaching, then you are going to have to pay for it "in spades" either in this life or in the next one. The other problem with this is that, at least in the Buddhist world view, you do not know what kind of karma you could have committed in any one of numerous past lives that might just be waiting around the corner to catch up with you. What if you were a murderer or an adulterer or a thief in your past life, or in the one before that, or perhaps a couple of hundred past lives ago? Your always looking over your shoulder spiritually for retribution to come hunting you down. You never know when the results of that bad karma that you did in some past life and remember nothing about could come around and hit you smack in the face with either a disaster or land you in a future rebirth in some terrible hell for a couple of billion or trillion years where you are going to be sliced up and sauteed over and over again in an iron furnace until your bad karma is depleted.
This holds out little hope for the penitent sinner who nearing the end of his life realizes his wrong ways and wishes to make a confession and depart with a clean slate. The other question we have to ask ourselves is since our salvation and a good rebirth depends entirely on our own actions in Buddhism, then how good is good enough to merit a good rebirth or nirvana? The goal in Buddhism, if you are not going to spend your life as a monk and seek enlightenment in this life, is to make karma work for you and not against you, to swing the pendulum more in the direction of good deeds instead of bad ones so that you can have a good rebirth in one of their heavens, or else as a happy human being somewhere where the Dharma is being preached. So you want to go around doing nice things for people to merit that good rebirth. This all sounds well and good, and in fact good deeds should be done by all people (especially Christians), the milk of human kindness is essential for us if we are to have any kind of meaningful life in this world, but what kind of standard does Buddhism hold out for people to subscribe to for their good actions to add up to whatever it takes to avoid hell and get into one of the heavenly realms, much less nirvana? Is it one good deed a day; how can we know if our good deeds are going to outweigh our bad ones? Buddhism does not say, and I would rather take my chances with a clean confession to God and accepting His forgiveness instead of the mindless, threshing machine-like forces of karma.

There is nothing in Buddhism that compares with that sublime passage in the gospels "Your sins are forgiven you. Go and sin no more". Christ, being God, could forgive sin. Buddha, being a mere man, could only give out good advice. The northern Mahayana Buddhists have come up with a kind of solution to this; having rejected the Hindu deities, they went on to set up their own pantheon of deities under the heading of cosmic Buddhas and bodhisattvas who rescue sentient beings who call on their names. In Mahayana Buddhism they have the five "Dhyana Buddhas", Amitabha of the West, Akshobia of the East, Vairocana, Ratnasambhava, and Amoghasiddhi.

These are the Five Celestial Buddhas. Vairocana, the "Illuminator" (centre), is the universal sage or cakravartin Buddha, also known as the "Primordial Buddha", from whence all the other Buddhas spring, and is given status as being in existence before time and the universe itself existed. These are definitely god-like qualities. I am not equating Vairocana with God, he is not (in ancient Hindu tradition, Vairocana was the king of the demons), however the qualities of omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, eternity, and creation (Buddha lands created by celestial Buddhas) which the Dhyana Buddhas are said to possess, are definitely characteristics of a god, or gods (pantheism would be a more appropriate classification for Mahayana Buddhism; numerous deities who are called Buddhas instead of gods).

These Buddhas and bodhisattvas who Buddhists pray to are not saviours, they are fallen angels, the demons, who along with the devil rebelled against our Lord. And the Scripture, which cannot be broken, says that these demons, these Buddhas and bodhisattvas, know that there is one God, and they tremble. Some of these so-called masters in the Buddhist tradition are consorting with demons, and some of them might be demon possessed themselves, masquerading themselves to their followers as "angels of light", false messiahs promising liberation but leading into spiritual slavery.

As will be shown later on where I describe my experience years ago with a Buddhist master, we also have to ask ourselves just what actually happened to the original founder of Buddhism on that night when he attained "enlightenment". What was the true nature of his enlightenment? Did he really obtain liberation, or did he fall into the deepest recesses of a very dark realm of deception? In seeking to be free of the fetters of existence, did he himself become the victim of something that possessed him, and deceived him into thinking that he had arrived at ultimate truth?

Regarding the idol worship so prevalent in Mahayana Buddhism, let the Word of God shed some light on this: