Tracing the ancestry of humankind
Title: Answer me, Lord above
Author: Carl Muller
Pages: 91
Rival Publications
Price: Rs. 275
The prolific and award winning writer, Carl Muller, in his usual
indomitable fashion, has dropped another bombshell. This time it is a
critique on the religious creation of man as opposed to his evolution
from apes. Muller supports his stance through a fairly heavy literature
survey.
'Answer me, Lord above' is the first book in a series that Muller
plans to provide the reader with an encyclopedia of religion in all its
forms, dogmas and doctrines and the claim made to humankind that
religion offers eternal bliss or everlasting torment after death.
In a foreword to the book, Muller writes that religion has some
stubborn quality that makes people to hold on to false beliefs
overriding their common sense. Scientific research has shown that
Testaments and other scriptures have falsehoods. He says that now
religion is about rites, ceremonies, taboos and even sacrifices. It
fawns on material objects, icons, temples and so-called holy places.
Religion is not about a relationship between man and God, but of a
notion of priests and humans. Yet, all the research and scientific
knowledge have not rid us of our addiction to religion.
 In the first chapter, titled 'In the Age of Pre-religion', he writes
that it is only through archeology that we have evidence of world's
oldest religious beliefs, but our ancestors who lived many years ago
were oriented towards practical matters, not religion. The Proconsul who
was the common ancestor of man and ape, could have evolved either to
take up a life in the trees as smaller apes or to live an erect life on
grasslands like the Dawn Man. When Carl Linnaeus published 'Systema
Naturae' in 1735, classifying Man with mammals, the priests were
outraged, insisting that Adam was the true ancestor of Man and not some
crude half-ape, half -human brute.
The most important fact about humankind's ancestor is that he walked
up right. Archaeological evidence shows that Java Man, Peking Man and
the Neanderthal Man, though primitive and low-browed, were true men and
not transitional forms between animals and men. Louis S.B. Leakey, who
wrote his Cambridge thesis on the Stone Age of Kenya, and his wife Mary,
worked around Tanganyika's Olduvai Gorge and found the oldest Near-Man
skull to be known in the whole of eastern and central Africa. "Africa
was located as the primeval centre of human expansion and dispersion,"
commented the French paleontologist, Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, at
an important symposium on anthropology in New York. "..Man has at last
found his birthplace - and his earliest ancestors. He was no longer a
backgroundless, unrelated, unproved creature-from-nowhere on this
planet."
In the chapter, 'The Ancestry of Man', Muller mentions two critical
turning points in the evolution of man. When the first mammalians began
walking on their hind legs, tool use was made possible. When due to a
drying climate, they shifted to a meat diet, tool use was a must. In the
last chapter, 'The Emergence of Homo Sapience' Muller gives voice to
certain things which still bothers him. "The Christian God is said to
have created one man and one woman. These creatures had to be Homo
sapiens. When they were driven out, that had all the knowledge and
ability to follow agricultural pursuits, keep sheep and cattle, build
homes to settle in, and rear their children. Is this all a myth or a
story created by priests? What of all the proto-man creatures that
walked the earth? Or is it that God exterminated all ape-life to make
room for Adam and Eve?"
The tail-end of the book has a long poem Muller has composed about
'Life an Argument'. A section from it reads as "One of Shakespeare's
characters said that the mind is 'the slave of life.' But I am led to
think that the mind is another of Nature's tools for life - and is one
more condition that rules all the work of life. What can we ever find
that is unearthly in life's nature? Priests blind us with their
well-conceived web of lies, and say that we come from God, and bid us
pray that we return to him - that we are not of this earth: that our
minds are not of this but of some other birth deriving from stars!
....Yes, this is life - an ever-changing scene - And God, it ever is, is
but a priestly scheme!"
- Jayanthi Liyanage
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