Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 222
THE CONCEPT OF GOD AMONG. THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA. The only principle they know is their conviction that there is no God. The purpose of their enquiry is simply to investigate why people worship God or godly images while they do not exist. Hence the growth of superstitions culminating in the creation of gods is the only subject of their enquiry. . Having said that, let us now draw the attention of the reader to the history of religion in Australia. It is a continent whose culture, social and religious history can be traced back to at least twenty-five thousand years. Many scholars extend it to forty thousand years or beyond. . According to some researchers, however, this period could extend even to a past as remote as one hundred and thirty thousand years of unbroken, unadulterated and undisturbed growth of religion. . The Australian continent is not only unique in having been completely broken off from the rest of the world, it is also unique in containing within it hundreds of social islands, each comprising tribes that remained entirely isolated from each other. It is known that between five hundred to six hundred such tribal units had their own independent history of social and religious development, throughout an age of twenty-five to forty thousand years, in complete isolation from each other except for occasional marginal contacts at the boundaries of their territories. . Such contacts were not only brief, but also ineffectual in transferring their ideologies, beliefs, myths and superstitions to each other. It was not only the language barriers which stood in the way, but also their traditional aversion to socialize and communicate with outsiders, which had created an impassable barrier in the way of transfer of information from one to the other. . If the sociologist's view which begins with the negation of God has any substance in it, then in each of the 218 i