An Example of Perverseness Towards Human History

We here quote from a history of the Polynesian people on the island of Tahiti:

Many Polynesian infants never drew a first breath because they were strangled by their parents, usually their fathers, before they could take a first breath. In many respects, though not all, this was the main means of birth control. (Our corresponding one is abortion.) And birth control was even more important to them on their finite little islands—in an earlier stage of the evolution of their culture—than ours is now in an overpopulated, finite globe. We are only just beginning to realize the absolute necessity of abortion. You may cringe, as the missionaries did, at what they considered the unspeakable horror of infanticide, but if a fetus is to be curtailed, what really is the difference between three months and nine? Mind you, the importance to the Tahitian of a baby’s first breath. If the mother wished to and was able to trick the fetus’s father into going fishing or going into the mountains to fetch the orange-colored plantain, or going to carry a present to his sister on the other side of the island, or whatever, an hour before delivery, so that when he returned the infant was breathing, no power or spirit would make him go through with his obligation to snuff out the life. Because, with the first breath, life had begun, and no social law told him to be a murderer. His duty to society, and also the mother’s to social survival, was to abort the life before it started. So let that be the first contrast to our mores.

[Edward Dodd; The Rape of Tahiti]

Note the perverse tone of this narrative. It is stubbornly dishonest. It contends that the Polynesian people had to do as they did—“the absolute necessity of abortion.” Here is immorality stifling the conscience by contending that murder is necessary for survival. The same author professes admiration for the “innocence” of these individuals, their “childlikeness,” etc. He would have us to believe that the people who discovered them and removed their isolation from the rest of the world did them a great disservice. Thus is perpetuated the myth of the “noble savage,” violated and ravaged in his primitive purity by the corrupting mores of modern civilization. Thus is preached the doctrine that morality is hypocritical and unnecessary. What a perverse, unbelieving spirit is manifested in all this! Thoroughly dishonest, it picks through the history of man, carefully selecting what few evidences can be twisted into a show of support for its unholy affections.

To get a better idea of what happened on Tahiti, we can read a history of the people of the Hawaiian islands. The author of this work spells out an account of the end of a people who embrace the spirit of adultery and sexual uncleanness:

Women started childbearing in their early teens. Families of twenty children and more were commonplace.

And this propagation was heartily encouraged by chiefs, since the importance of their domains was measured in part by the number of subjects they could claim.

To be sure, little sentiment was expended by parents on their young offspring, and many of them never survived. Family ties were loose, principally because few mothers could ever be quite sure who had fathered a child. “For husbands to interchange wives and for wives to interchange husbands,” explained historian Sheldon Dibble, “was a common act of friendship, and persons who would not do this were not considered on good terms of sociability…. When a solicitation is made, they seem to imagine… that to comply is generous, liberal and social, and to refuse is reproachful and niggardly. From this confused state of things… it will be understood at once that there could be little or no attachment in the various domestic relations.”

Children came easily and regularly, and there were so many of them that they were seldom kept together as brothers and sisters. They were freely exchanged or given away like other possessions, so that many children never knew who their real parents were, and the parents themselves lost track. Deformed, sluggish, or ill-tempered babies were unceremoniously put out of the way; others were neglected; sickly ones were placed out of sight and sound where their cries would not be disturbing, and allowed to languish and waste away.

In an amoral society, there was no one to condemn either abortion or infanticide. Both were accepted without qualms of conscience. Still the survival rate of the young at least balanced the death rate of adults.

[W. Storrs Lee; The Islands]

What we are reading about is the disintegration of the family unit entirely through unrestrained licentiousness and promiscuity. The spirit of perverseness contends that this is “natural” and “wholesome.” It was not. The same author paints us a picture of what it was like to live in such a society:

“As you are passing the outskirts of some city or village,” dramatized historian Dibble, “you behold a wretched woman carrying something to a secluded spot. You observe her as she stops, lays down her burden and digs a pit in the earth. Ah! What is that she is about to bury? Her own smiling infant. The child perhaps is sick and troubles her…. She stifles its cries for a moment with her hand, thrusts it into the grave prepared, covers it with a little earth and tramples it down while struggling yet in the agonies of death.

“But wait and look around a little,” he continued, “and you will find that this is not the first grave she has dug. Perhaps this may be the fifth or the seventh child she has disposed of in the same way, and for many of them perhaps for no better motives than to rid herself of trouble or to leave herself more free for sensual pleasure and vicious indulgence.”

A missionary wife accidentally discovered that her own serving girl, Pali, and the young brother who always accompanied her were the sole survivors of a family of ten children. The other eight had all been buried alive, and the brother lived only because Pali had followed her mother to the burial place and promptly disinterred him.

[The Islands]

Here is a true picture of sin. Conscience seared and any sense of responsibility trampled. The vulnerability of the innocent.

We also need to understand sin in its true color: deforming, defiling, breaking of the righteous law, affronting an awful majesty, profaning a sovereign crown by casting it to the ground. We need to see sin as sin is. But to do this we must be under the influence and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is only then that sin appears exceedingly sinful. Even if saved people get too far out from under the influence of the Holy Spirit, sin will not look as bad to them as it actually is.

[Ostis B. Wilson; The Nature of Sin]

The Bible speaks of the hardening effect of the deceitfulness of sin (Hebrews 3:13). It tells us that the wicked human heart is wicked above all things to the extent that it is impossible for man to know himself and the full effect of his sinful behavior, except as he is reproved by the Holy Spirit (Jeremiah 17:9; John 16:7-8). Except the Lord dealt with each of us, we would have no chance at all; we would not know sin as sin truly is. But, when God has dealt with us, and a certain amount of light has been cast on our condition, the question is then what we will do with what we are convicted of. Will we humble and acknowledge and seek for help, or will we resist conviction and make excuses? This latter course will lead to perverseness. It actually results in men attempting to bend truth to suit their inclinations.

These truths cast light on the heart condition of Mr. Edward Dodd, the Tahitian historian quoted at the beginning of this article. Mr. Dodd is not appalled at the gross immorality practiced by the Polynesian people. One senses that he thinks it is “natural,” even “healthy.” He has walked down this path of perverseness long enough that it has deceived him into thinking that the murder of the innocent is “absolute necessity.” This conclusion flies in the face of all truth. It would cast down such truths as, “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”* (Luke 6:31) Mr. Dodd was able to write his perverse thinking because someone spared his life when he was helpless and took care of him when he was innocent and vulnerable. In thus debasing human life by claiming the right to snuff it out at will, Mr. Dodd devalues his own life. He makes a mockery of all that is decent and honorable. Jesus tells us, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”* (Matthew 16:26) but this perverse Mr. Dodd would put us on the level of the beasts: “It’s time to cull the (human) herd; it is inconvenient to have so many children running about.”

One does not even have to be saved or love the Lord to see the folly of this deception. A little honesty, a little attentiveness to the conscience, a little discernment of the results of sin in the history of men are more than enough to convict the mind of any serious thinker. We will quote again from W. Storrs Lee, the historian of the Hawaiian people:

Yet Hawaiians were perishing en masse before the march of civilization. Actually they had been indulging in an orgy of self-destruction long before the influx of disease-carrying foreigners, so great an orgy that only a phenomenal birth rate could account for anything like a “teeming population.” For them life was cheap, and death held no fears. They could afford to live recklessly and kill recklessly. The carnage of their pitched battles taxed credulity; the scale of their wars was Homeric.

Nearly a century after the coming of the white men, acres of battlefields, like Diamond Head Crater on Oahu and Keei on Hawaii, still glistened with bleached skeletons of slain warriors. And these bones represented only a fraction of the total casualties. Victorious armies relentlessly sought out the families and supporters of the vanquished enemy to prolong the slaughter over periods of weeks and months. “When discovered, they are cruelly massacred on the spot,” lamented William Ellis, “or brought down to the king and chiefs… to die perhaps, to live perhaps.” John Young testified in his old age that he had seen thousands massacred in the wars of extermination.

The mortality from interisland and intertribal clashes alone would have prostrated a less resilient and less prolific people. And between wars the demand of priests for human sacrifices and the enforcement of capital punishment for violation of taboos constituted a steady drain on the population. Temple kahunas possessed a powerful incentive for the enforcement of taboos, for violators all made acceptable candidates for sacrifice on the altars of the gods.

“The restrictions of the chiefs and priests were like the poisoned tooth of a reptile,” observed the dispassionate young adventurer Francis Olmsted. “If the shadow of a common man fell upon a chief, it was death; if he put on a mantle or malo of a chief, it was death; if he went upon the house of a chief, it was death. If a man was found standing on those occasions when he should prostrate himself, viz., when the King’s bathing water or his tapa or his malo, were carried along, it was death. So, too, if he continued standing at the mention of the king’s name in song, it was death…. If he was irreligious, he suffered death; if he indulged in connubial pleasure on a taboo day, he paid the same penalty; if he made a noise while prayers were saying, he met a like fate. If a woman ate pork, cocoanuts, bananas, a certain kind of fish, or lobster, it was death. So, too, was it death to be found in a canoe on a taboo day.” Added to these were a great many other causes of premature death, like participation in too dangerous and chancy sports, settlement of private feuds, addiction to awa drinking, accidents at sea and in the high mountains, not to mention the occasional depopulation of whole villages by tidal waves and lava flows. Flirting with death was a favorite Hawaiian occupation.

Yet, despite this rampant slaughter, in the years before the intrusion of foreigners, the throngs of growing youth always seemed to keep pace with the death toll. Women started childbearing in their early teens. Families of twenty children and more were commonplace.

[W. Storrs Lee; The Islands]

With the coming of men from America and Europe, a judgment came upon this promiscuous people—the scourge of venereal disease was loosed upon the population. The same visitation that restrained men and women in other parts of the world came to the islands.

Under influence of the killer, what little family adhesiveness once existed deteriorated further. The incentive for bringing up large families was lost. Raising children was not worth the struggle. They were expensive in labor and taxes, an extravagance, a burden, an encumbrance. Infants became the unwanted. The rate of conception was unchanged, but the number of surviving children was shockingly reduced. Where there had once been families of twenty sons and daughters, two were more than enough.

Puzzled by the small size of family groups, William Ellis pried into the reasons for it on his extensive tour of Hawaii. He concluded:

We have long known that the Sandwich Islanders practiced infanticide, but had no idea of its extent until we made various inquiries. It prevails throughout all the islands, and, with the exception of the higher class of chiefs, is, as far as we could learn, practiced by all ranks of people. However numerous the children among the lower orders, parents seldom rear more than two or three, and many spare only one; all the others are destroyed sometimes shortly after birth, generally during the first year of their age…. It is painful to think of the numbers thus murdered.

Missionaries commonly agreed that at least two-thirds of the children had perished at the hands of parents. Fathers and mothers unconcernedly admitted their complicity, giving as reasons the trouble of bringing them up, the handicap of roving about with young ones in tow, the annoyance of their crying, the bother of feeding them, deformities and trying illnesses of one sort or another. In fits of jealousy mothers killed the favorite child of their husbands, and in retributive fits, husbands killed the wife’s favorite. They suffocated them, strangled them, beat them to death, dashed them on stones, but most frequently buried them alive.

Some paradise on earth, wasn’t it? In spite of all that the spirit of perverseness might claim, the truth of the matter is that “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”* (Proverbs 14:34)

The ultimate effect of the sin of these people was destruction:

By 1900 their total population… was down to less than thirty thousand, one-tenth of what it had been before foreigners inflicted upon the Islanders their diseases, their western worries, their monetary values, their horses and cattle, their standards of civilized living.

[Ibid.]

This was an awful fact, though by no means unusual in the history of man. Sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily (Ecclesiastes 8:11), but every transgression receives, in time, a just recompense (Hebrews 2:2). A large part of the history of mankind is the sinning and the reaping.

What do you suppose is the attitude of the spirit of perverseness toward such a disaster of such unconcealed proportions? A little humbling, perhaps? Some degree of abashment?

There had to be a popular scapegoat to carry the blame for such decimation, and the handiest one was the body of missionaries, nonmedical and medical. By insisting on dressing the natives in holokus and cotton pants, by helping to destroy their dance and sports, by discouraging bathing in the nude, by tampering with the superior diet of fish and poi, by introducing them to culture and letters that completely changed their manner of living, the missionaries undoubtedly contributed to the physical decline of the natives. But if the merchants and traders had been given a free hand, without missionary intervention, the Hawaiians most certainly would have been virtually annihilated. The few that remained in 1900 owed their lives to pompous Hiram Bingham and his colleagues.

[Ibid.]

It’s the missionaries’ fault that the natives have come to disaster! What a lot of truth and fact this conclusion would ignore!

Late in the century clusters of journalists without too many chips on their shoulders—men like Richard Henry Dana and Mark Twain—weighed the arguments and went on record unequivocally in favor of the missionaries. But no affirmation counted for more than that of worldly John Young, who knew the kingdom intimately both before and after the arrival of the New England apostles. He avowed:

Whereas it has been represented by many persons that the labors of the missionaries in these Islands are attended with evil and disadvantages to the people, I hereby most cheerfully give my testimony to the contrary…. I am persuaded that nothing but Christianity could preserve the people from total extinction.

It seems that God Himself has so fixed matters that those who are determined to be perverse will always find an interpretation which will support them in their perverseness. “For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.”* (1 Corinthians 3:19)

Perverseness, like all sin, never recovers itself, never finds a place to say, “This is enough—I will go no further.”

“When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.”* (Romans 1:21-25)