Influence of the 'fallen' on the 'unfallen'

The Plains Indians certainly were violent: as well as fighting against the Europeans, the different tribes constanty fought against each other, so that for 100 years the Plains area was, as the anthropologist Elman R. Service writes, "one of the arenas of the most intense tribal conflict ever known.” - Steve Taylor, The Fall

One of the developments I’m attempting to highlight is well illustrated in the “Plains Indians” of North America; the Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Pawnee.

In particular, this bit…
At the same time, they had a high level of social stratification, with warriors acquiring different degrees of status according to how successful they were.”

However, it’s a big mistake to see the Plains Indians as typical of the Native Americans as a whole. Apart from being just one out of many different cultures, their culture was an artificial development which only came about as a result of European influence.

Influence. As I’ve stated elsewhere, this transition of humanity from being a peaceful, egalitarian species to a warring, class-conscious one is the effect of the introduction of Adam and Eve into a populated world. It’s the introduction of sin into the world. According to what the bible describes, what came before Adam was quite different than what came after.

The Native Americans of the plains are a prime example of what I’d like to point out. The ‘unfallen’ were not genetically different than the ‘fallen’. They had within them all the capability to behave and operate just as their more advanced invaders. It just wasn’t enacted until it was coaxed out in response to the influence of the presence of the ‘fallen’ in their environment. Characteristics much more in line with those of their attackers began to emerge.

This same transition from ‘unfallen’ to ‘fallen’ behavior comes just before the birth of the civilization builders of Human history. All of them, beginning in Sumer (the setting of early Genesis) …

The appearance of the Ubaid folk has sometimes been linked to the so-called Sumerian problem, related to the origins of Sumerian civilisation. Whatever the ethnic origins of this group, this culture saw for the first time a clear tripartite social division between intensive subsistence peasant farmers, with crops and animals coming from the north, tent-dwelling nomadic pastoralists dependent upon their herds, and hunter-fisher folk of the Arabian littoral, living in reed huts.

The Ubaid period as a whole, based upon the analysis of grave goods, was one of increasingly polarised social stratification and decreasing egalitarianism.” - Ubaid period - Wikipedia

… and it continue on through Egypt to the east and the Indus Valley to the west and Europe to the north. Everywhere civilization went, the change from egalitarian to class stratification preceded it. Equality to patriarchy. And with it came also organized warfare, the love of personal possession, and patriarchy.

So I would argue if the people of the Native American plains were not pitted against a foe already well ahead of them in development (because they were influenced well earlier in their development), they would have come up just like them.

This, I argue, is an observation of the effect of sin being introduced into the world through Adam.

One other fun tidbit I’d like to inject here, just to reinforce the connection and the timing between the “book of scripture” and the “book of nature”.

Gen4:19 - Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah. 20 Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock.

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