A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and EssaysBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and Essays
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought
On the third point we again quote Dr. Nott: "The only argument left,
then, is that of congenital varieties or peculiarities, which are said
to spring up and be transmitted from parent to child, so as to form new
races. Let us pause for a moment to illustrate this fanciful idea. The
negroes of Africa, for example, are admitted not to be offsets from some
other race which have been gradually blackened and changed in a moral
and physical type by the action of climate, but it is asserted that
'once, in the flight of ages,' some genuine little negro, or rather many
such, were born of Caucasian, Mongol, or other light-skinned parents,
and then have turned about and changed the type of the inhabitants of a
whole continent. So, in America, the countless aborigines found on this
continent, which we have reason to believe were building mounds before
the time of Abraham, are the offspring of a race changed by accidental
or congenital varieties. Thus, too, old China, India, Australia, Oceana,
etc., all owe their types, physical and mental, to congenital and
accidental varieties, and are descended from Adam and Eve! Can human
credulity go further, or human ingenuity invent any argument more
absurd?"
But even supposing these objections to the second and third suppositions
set aside, there are two other propositions which, if affirmed, as I
believe they may be, entirely overthrow the orthodox assertion "that
Adam and Eve, six thousand years ago, were the first pair; and that all
diversities now existing must find their common source in Noah--less
than four thousand three hundred years from the present time." These two
are as follows.
1. That man may be traced back on the earth long prior to the alleged
Adamic era.
2. That there are diversities traceable as existing among the human race
four thousand five hundred years ago as marked as in the present day.
To illustrate the position that man may be traced back to a period long
prior to the Adamic era, we refer our readers to the chronology of the
late Baron Bunsen, who, while allowing about 22,000 years for man's
existence on earth, fixes the following dates, after a patient
examination of the Nilotic antiquities:
Egyptians under a republican form.............. 10,000 B. C.
Ascension of Bytis, the Theban, first Priest King. 9,085
Elective Kings in Egypt......................... 7,280
Hereditary Kings in Upper and Lower Egypt (a
double empire) form......................... 5,143*
* Nott and Gliddon, "Indigenous Races," page 687.
The assertion of such an antiquity for Egypt is no modern hypothesis.
Plato puts language into the mouth of an Egyptian first claiming in that
day an antecedent 10,000 years for painting and sculpture in Egypt. This
has long been regarded as fabulous because it was contrary to the Hebrew
chronology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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