Before organized religion, before Buddhism, Hindu, Islam, or Christianity, in West Sumatra, Indonesia, they believed in nature, or Animism.

In a certain area, their equivilant of a creation myth involved an over-crowded tree of gibbons...Two gibbons were forced to climb out of the tree, and these were the first human beings.

In Europe, Darwin was only a revolutionary because of religion.

Darwin was only a revolutionary because every one, including himself, was Christian with great affirmation.

Travelling Indonesia, I told many friends, and even some strangers, that I believed that man came from the ape.

Many people in Indonesia seem to hold the idea that religion is just simply 'good for you', like a vitamin. & some of them, just as this Muslim man told me, will even go so far as to say: "Science might be rational, and that appeals to the left brain...But the right side of the brain is mostly irrational, and you need something like religion to keep balanced."

Having been not only touched by, but home to kingdoms of, Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic beliefs, a Chilian student of mine once suggested that the locals are too amiable...

But it seemed to me that perhaps with all of the colonialism, and the spread of religions, Indonesians only gained tolerance, respect for these other religions, and a greater sense that all religions are different means to the same end.

I once followed a man named Eddy Murphy into the jungle near Bogor to awaken a genie that would, in exchange for years off of Eddy's life, grant him his wishes. We had to wait in the night, gathered around a cemetery that was oddly located in tall-treed jungle, and I took video of the men praying in the dark, cold woods.

Their God would be Tuhan, or Allhua, the God of Muslims, and so they spoke accordingly in memorized Arabic verses. But in truth, the belief of a genie in the forest who is said to appear using the dead bodies of the cemetary as their door, is Hindu.

Rather than refer to the genie as a genie, my hairstylist friend, Eddy Murphy, and the others, gathered in desperation to give years of their life for a wish, referred to the one they were asking things of as simply 'Satan'. Seeing as mixing your religious beliefs is, of course, seen as a blasphemous short cut to hell, this renaming makes sense.

Religions layered upon religions, the last one is kept alive, integrated into the new one, surviving just like the Indonesian culture during the opressive, enslaving, dark, 300 years of colonialization by the Dutch.

And even today, a few thousand years since the first religion, Buddhism, came to Indonesia, forming the kingdom of Sriwijaya, and began the process of lying on top of Animism, or nature worship, if you use kind words to suggest and explain evolution, simply proposing that man came from the animals, you might receive a very revealing nod of the head...

You may even be lucky to find somebody who is bold enough to say: 'Memang itu awal kita yang benar.'

Meaning: 'Of course that was our real beginning'...


I repeat, Darwin was only a revolutionary because England had such affirmation in her Christianity ...

Without organized religion, how much sooner would an animistic culture have come to the conclusion of natural selection by disgarding the creative mysticism of their primitive beliefs?

Natural selection is not such a powerful idea. It is not such a conclusion. It is intuitive. It is logical. It is not even science.

And by saying that evolution is not even science, the great debate is over, because one fighter has pulled out of the ring.

Though Animism included belief in ghosts and souls, deities that lived inside of old trees and mountains, ganges and himalayas, the fundamental idea of MANY primitive cultures was correct, from the beginning...