Although John Singer was a guy with ethics and values quite different to many Americans (certainly to mine...), still... he was an American citizen. John Singer was born in New York on 6 January 1931.

He was a member of the Mormon Church who was later excommunicated for his fundamentalist beliefs, including the practice of polygamy (By the way, Singer wasn't... the only polygamist in his neck of the woods. As a matter of interesting fact, the practice of polygamy in the southwestern United States has been on an increase in the last several years.)

Singer gained public notoriety because of his stand against what he felt was the immorality of the school system (So, what's new! I would hope that LAUSD or any other school district in our country doesn't take criticism... that personally!).

For more information which finally came to light in a US criminal trial... about governmental agency deception, murder and attempt at covering up a recent incident which left an American shot dead in the back, check out the following book review link:
 

Death of an American: The Killing of John Singer, David Fleisher and David M. Freedman, (1983)

Or: John Singer

"...that the idea of a human "soul" must have been the natural seed thought from which all other religious concepts evolved. Ancient savages, Tylor suggested, imagined that they had "souls" while wondering at two groups of biological problems: sleep, ecstasy, illness, and death on one hand, and dreams and visions on the other. The idea of "soul" was reinforced as savages noticed their reflections in water, or their own shadows.... Once primitives got used to thinking of themselves as possessing souls, Tylor continued, it dawned upon them that other entities -- animals, trees, rivers, mountains, the sky, and even forces of nature -- might be similarly endowed. Thus did spiritism (Tylor called it "animism") come to birth -- the first religion.

"Ages later, said Tylor, a new phenomenon emerged in some human societies -- stratification of classes!

[Remember: this concept was written at a time following the reasoning of enlightened savants whose various theories were putting people of faith to flight (for what reason... I do not know). After all, with the Church out of the way... these are the same learned men of the Age of Reason who also produced the philisophical mind set that ushered in Socialism, Communism, and ultimately Nazi-ism. Thank you very much! Tylor did his theorizing during this age when the "fittest" were surviving and some of the most unusual ideas were evolving. Added by ME! But back to the story...]

"Human aristocracies ruling over peasants suggested aristocracies of "gods" ruling over run-of-the-mill souls and spirits. Thus polytheism, in Tylor's model, emerged from spiritism -- but only where the social phenomenon oof stratification of classes prompted it!

"Still later, some human aristocracies experienced a further metamorphosis: one aristocrat was fortunate enough to be exalted above his peers as a monarch. Once again, theologically precocious minds projected this latest social development over their vision of the supernatural world. Result: one member of the local pantheon of gods began to gain stature above his fellow deities as a budding "supreme god." Thus monotheism, said Tylor, gradually evolved out of polytheism -- but only in areas where the social phenomenon of monarchy suggested it.

"For a more detailed summary of Tylor's theory, see pages 74-77 of Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt's The Origin and Growth of Religion, published in English by the Dial Press, New York, 1931.

"At least four notions were implicit in Tylor's evolutionary model. First, there was no longer anything very mysterious about religion; religion's natural origin and subsequent evolutionary development had now been scientifically explained. Second, since monotheism marked the final stage in religion's evolution, religion now reached the end of a dead-end street. Third, further developments in human society were already dictating the next step for people who wanted to stay on the crest of evolution's wave: abandon religion with its now defunct God, gods, or spirits....

"What, then, was the fourth notion implicit in Tylor's theory? It was the one which would make it possible to test the validity of Tylor's thesis by field research. If Tylor was correct, primitive societies would be devoid of monotheistic presuppositions, since class stratification and the later concept of a monarchy had not yet developed to prompt the notion of monotheism.

"Drawn by the impressive elegance of Tylor's theory, dozens of notable scholars gave him their initial support. Probably the most detailed documentation of what followed is found in the writings of Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt, an Austrian Catholic priest who was both a professor at Vienna University and the editor of Anthropos, a scholarly scientific journal. For example, in his Origin and Growth of Religion, Schmidt wrote: '[Tylor's theory] with its crushing weight of facts, its smooth and unbroken series of stages of development, and the concise, dispassionate style of its exposition, left no room for opposition... for the next three decades it remained "the classical theory,"... almost without any loss of prestige.... A notable proof of the extent to which Tylor's theory influenced the world is the fact that it was accepted by a number of prominent students of ethnology and religion almost without alteration. Such unqualified acceptance is to be found in ...' Schmidt went on to list 39 European and American scholars who endorsed Tylor's theory, naming the various books and articles in which their endorsements could be found.

"Occasionally, even in the heyday of evolutionary theories like Tylor's, a few voices at least tried to call attention to scattered reports that even very primitive tribes acknowledged the existence of a Creator. But scholars paid little or no attention. Schmidt describes their attitude as follows: 'The doctrine of progressive Evolution mastered the mind of all Europe, ... all framers of theories concerning fetishes, ghosts, animism, totemism and magic, if they agreed in nothing else, were at one in this, that the figure of the sky-god must be got rid of from the earliest stages of religion, as being too high and incomprehensible [for savage minds' ... unless it was preferred to deduce him from Christian influence. (p.134-137)

Unfortunately... eleven years later, in 1898... a favorite pupil of Tylor's, Andrew Lang read a missionary's report in which it was stated that primitive inhabitants of the distant place already acknowledged the existence of a Creator God even before the missionaries arrived! Lang's initial reactions were recorded: "[Lang's] impression was that the missionary had made a mistake. But the further his studies took him the more examples of this kind he met with, and at last he came to the conclusion that this fundamental tenet of Tylor's would not hold water. To this conviction he gave public expression in 1898, in his book The Making of Religion.... Apart from this, Lang was unweariedly busy and on the watch for new particulars to discover and publish, mistakes and misunderstandings to clear up, attacks to repel....

[Don't you just love a good fight between heavyweight academicians, scholars, and otherwise "keepers of the truth"?!]

"Seeing then that [Lang's objections] found lively expression in leading British periodicals, which of course are known everywhere abroad also, and that they represented the new views of a scholar of wide repute... it is hard to understand why the majority of specialists... outside Great Britain received Lang's utterances with the deepest silence." (p.139)

Well Professor Schmidt... it really isn't all that hard to understand! After you (that's right.. he's dead!) Well.. after WE read Eternity In Their Hearts... it isn't hard to understand at all.

Starting with the encounter with the Unknown God by Epimenides, the Athenian Elder / Senator living in 6th Century BC...

... citing the Theos of Xenophanes, Plato and Aristotle...

... recalling the Viracocha of Pachacuti (or Pachacutec) the ruler who brought the incredible Inca civilization to its finest flowering... rebuilding Cuzco, the Inca capital... fortifying its defenses from invasion from A.D. 1438 to 1471 (Machu Picchu... being the best and last refuge of the Incan upper class in its flight from Spain's brutal conquistadores. In fact, the conquistadores never found Machu Picchu. In 1906, an English missionary Thomas Paine serving under a society called Regions Beyond Missionary Union... actually discovered the ruins... lost for several centuries though most history books credit some other guy for making the discovery sometime in 1910.)...

... detailing the Thakur Jiu of the 2.5 million Santal near Calcutta, India...

... and describing the benevolent Magano of the 1/2 million Gedeo people in Ethiopia... the sky-god Koro of the Mbaka's... one of the Bantu tribes of Central African Republic... who "understood that Koro, the Creator, sent word to their forefathers long ages ago that He had already sent His Son into the world to accomplish something wonderful for all mankind. Later however, [their] forefathers turned away from the truth about Koro's Son. In time they even forgot what it was that He accomplished for mankind. Since the time of "the forgetting," successive generations of [their] people had longed to discover the truth about Koro's Son. But all [they] could learn was that messengers would eventually come to restore that forgotten knowledge to [them]. Somehow they also knew that the messengers would probably be...."

[Would be what??! THAT... in the finest circles... is called "dangling"!! Wouldn't you just love to know... what the Mbaka ancestors knew about their anticipated messengers a long time ago? (smile)]

Highlighting some of the most fascinating recorded encounters of early missionaries with various ethnic groups around the world... Don Richardson informs his readers about the worshippers of the great Shang Ti from the earliest times of Chinese history until the Zhou Dynasty (1066-770 B.C.) when worship of Shang Ti became the exclusive right of the upper class... leaving the lower classes to the later influences of: 1. Confucianism - a social philosophic structure maintaining the status quo (Confucius advised the people to forget Shang Ti because He was too high and unapproachable for the common folks); 2.  Taoism -- countered the religious instinct of a large majority of Chinese unsatisfied with social-Confucianism; and, 3. Buddhism -- took over China with its polytheism (sort of like a god (or saint..) for any and every occasion... approach to life... since Shang Ti wasn't enough..) in spite of its celibacy tenet which never really caught on to any appreciable extent in the most populous place on planet Earth! (By the way, a careful study of Chinese ideographs called: radicals... is a fascinating as the various combinations of these 214 radicals form between 30,000 and 50,000 ideographs... some with unusual symbolism. For example: the ideograph for "righteous"...contains an upper and lower part. The upper part was simply the Chinese symbol for a lamb. Directly under the lamb was a second symbol, the first person pronoun I. The Chinese character for righteous is: I under the Lamb. For further study check out C.H. Kang's book: The Discovery of Genesis.)

Richardson describes those who first grasped the meaning of the Hananim of Korean faith...

... and the Y'wa of the Karen of Burma... who, like the Mbaka of Central Africa... awaited their appointed return to great Y'wa for centuries as they sang their Songs of Hope.

... the Karai Kasang... of the Kachin in far north Burma...

... the Gui'Sha who promised to send his messengers with the words lost by the Lahu forefathers living near Laos so long ago...

...the Wa tribes scattered throughout the same Southeast Asian mountainous region... who condemned headhunting and spirit-appeasement because of their Siyeh...

... the Phra-Ariya-Metrai of the Shan and Palaung Peoples... the Kui of Thailand and Burma... the Lisu of China... India's Naga race's Chepo-Thuru... the Mizo peoples of India among whom the British man Adoniram Judson worked in 1817...

... the Peace Child of the Sawi in New Guinea...

... the Wakan Tonka of the Souix... or the Saharen-Tyee of the Chehalis...

... and lest some of us forget the all-powerful, eternal Gott... or Gud... or God of our tribal ancestors from Northern Europe...

Don Richardson's illustrations go on and on! Eternity In Their Hearts will engage the serious seeker. And just perhaps we will discover a little more about the One of whom Isaiah the Prophet wrote:

    Surely Thou art a God who hidest Himself...

Or is He? Paradoxically, history reveals He doesn't mind being found.

[An aside: For other interesting history touching on multi-cultural religious themes... go see The Bethlehem Star.]