Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 64
THE EVOLUTIONARY RACES OF COLOR
1. Many of man's earliest religious emotions grew out of his feeling of helplessness in the shut‑in environment of this geographic situation—mountains to the right, water to the left, and ice in front. But these progressive Andonites would not turn back to their inferior tree‑dwelling relatives in the south.
2. These Andonites avoided the forests in contrast with the habits of their nonhuman relatives. In the forests man has always deteriorated; human evolution has made progress only in the open and in the higher latitudes. The cold and hunger of the open lands stimulate action, invention, and resourcefulness.
3. 950,000 years ago the descendants of Andon and Fonta had migrated far to the east and to the west. To the west they passed over Europe to France and England. In later times they penetrated eastward as far as Java, where their bones were so recently found—the so‑called Java man —and then journeyed on to Tasmania.
4. Civilizations of great promise have successively deteriorated and have finally been extinguished by the folly of allowing the superior freely to procreate with the inferior.
5. 900,000 years ago the arts of Andon and Fonta and the culture of Onagar were vanishing from the face of the earth; culture, religion, and even flintworking were all at their lowest ebb...During this long period of cultural decadence the Foxhall peoples of England and the Badonan tribes northwest of India continued to hold on to some of the traditions of Andon and certain remnants of the culture of Onagar.. And these people, as they were later admixed with subsequent stocks, journeyed on west from England after a later ice visitation and have survived as the present‑day Eskimos.
6. Besides the Foxhall peoples in the west, another struggling center of culture persisted in the east. This group was located in the foothills of the northwestern Indian highlands among the tribes of Badonan, a great‑great‑grandson of .Andon. These people were the only descendants of Andon who never practiced human sacrifice.
7. 850,000 years ago the superior Badonan tribes began a warfare of extermination directed against their inferior and animalistic neighbors ...This campaign for the extermination of inferiors brought about a slight improvement in the hill tribes of that age. And the mixed descendants of this improved Badonite stock appeared on the stage of action as an apparently new people—the Neanderthal race.
8. The Neanderthalers were excellent fighters, and they traveled extensively...They dominated the world for almost half a million years until the times of the migration of the evolutionary races of color.
9. 800,000 years ago game was abundant; many species of deer, as well as elephants and hippopotamuses, roamed over Europe. Cattle were plentiful; horses and wolves were everywhere. The Neanderthalers were great hunters, and the tribes in France were the first to adopt the practice of giving the most successful hunters the choice of women for wives.
10. These times of the fourth and fifth glaciers witnessed the further spread of the crude culture of the Neanderthal races. But there was so little progress that it truly appeared as thought the attempt to produce a new and modified type of intelligent life on Urantia was about to fail. For almost a quarter of a million years these primitive peoples drifted on, hunting and fighting, by spells improving in certain directions, but, on the whole, steadily retrogressing as compared with their superior Andonic ancestors.
11. The Neanderthalers really had no religion beyond a shameful superstition. They were deathly afraid of clouds, more especially of mists and fogs ...This new religion of fear led to attempts to placate the invisible forces behind these natural elements and culminated, later on, in the sacrificing of humans to appease these invisible and unknown physical forces. And this terrible practice of human sacrifice has been perpetuated by the more backward peoples of Urantia right on down to the twentieth century.
12. 500,000 years ago the Badonan tribes of the northwestern highlands of India became involved in another great racial struggle...only about one hundred families were left. And now, among these highland Badonites there was a new and strange occurrence. A man and women living in the northeastern part of the then inhabited highland region began suddenly to produce a family of unusually intelligent children. This was the Sangik family, the ancestors of all of the six colored races of Urantia. These Sangik children, nineteen in number ...were five red., two orange, four yellow, two green, four blue, and two indigo.
13. On an average evolutionary planet the six evolutionary races of color appear one by one; the red man is the first to evolve, and for ages he roams the world before the succeeding colored races make their appearance. The simultaneous emergence of all six races on Urantia, and in one family, was most unusual. The appearance of the earlier Andonites on Urantia was also something new in Satania. On no other world in the local system has such a race of will creatures evolved in advance of the evolutionary races of color.
14. The red man...They were a most intelligent group and were the first of the Sangik children to develop a tribal civilization and government...In later times they had serious and prolonged trouble with their yellow brethren in Asia. They were aided by their early invention of the bow and arrow, but they had unfortunately inherited much of the tendency of their ancestors to fight among themselves, and this so weakened them that the yellow tribes were able to drive them off the Asiatic continent.
15. About eighty‑five thousand. years ago the comparatively pure remnants of the red race went en masse across to North America, and shortly thereafter the Bering land isthmus sank, thus isolating them.
16. Because of this great retrogression the red man seemed doomed when, about sixty‑five thousand years ego, Onamonalonton appeared as their leader and spiritual deliverer. He brought temporary peace among the American red men and revived their worship of the "Great Spirit." Onamonalonton lived to be ninety‑six years of age and maintained his headquarters among the great redwood trees of California.
17. The orange man. The outstanding characteristic of this race was their peculiar urge to build, to build anything and everything, even to the piling up of vast mounds of stone just to see which tribe could build the largest mound.
18. The orange race was the first to follow the coast line southward toward Africa as the Mediterranean Sea withdrew to the west. But they never secured a favorable footing in Africa and were wiped out of existence by the later arriving green race.
19. The yellow man. The primitive yellow tribes were the first to abandon the chase, establish settled communities, and develop a home life based on agriculture. Intellectually they were somewhat inferior to the red man, but socially and collectively they proved themselves superior to all of the Sangik peoples in the matter of fostering racial civilization.
20. The survival of comparatively large numbers of the yellow race is due to their intertribal peacefulness. From the days of Singlangton to the times of modern China, the yellow has been numbered among the more peaceful of the nations of Urantia. This race received a small but potent legacy of the later imported Adamic stock.
21. The green race split into three major divisions: The northern tribes were subdued, enslaved, and absorbed by the yellow and blue races. The eastern group were amalgamated with the Indian peoples of those days, and. remnants still persist among them. The southern nation entered Africa, where they destroyed their almost equally inferior orange cousins ...The remnants of the victorious green men were subsequently absorbed by the indigo race.
22. The blue men were a great people. They early invented the spear and subsequently worked out the rudiments of many of the arts of modern civilization. The blue man had the brain power of the red man associated with the soul and sentiment of the yellow man. The Adamic descendants preferred them to all of the later persisting colored races.
23. The so‑called white races of Urantia are the descendants of these blue men as they were first modified by slight mixture with yellow and red., and as they were later greatly upstepped by assimilating the greater portion of the violet race.
24. As the red men were the most advanced of all the Sangik peoples, so the black men were the least progressive...Isolated in Africa, the indigo peoples, like the red man, received little or none of the race elevation which would have been derived from the infusion of the Adamic stock...Notwithstanding their backwardness, these indigo peoples have exactly the same standing before the celestial powers as any other earthly race.
25. There are many good and sufficient reasons for the plan of evolving either three or six colored races on the worlds of space ...we would call attention to the following:
1. Variety is indispensable to opportunity for the wide functioning of natural selection.
2. Stronger and better races are to be had from the interbreeding of diverse peoples when these different races are carriers of superior inheritance factors...The attempt to execute such an experiment on Urantia under present racial conditions would be highly disastrous.
3. Competition is healthfully stimulated by diversification of races.
4. Differences in status of the races and of groups within each race are essential to the development of human tolerance and altruism.
5. Homogeneity of the human race is not desirable until the peoples of an evolving world attain comparatively high levels of spiritual development.
26. Between the times of the Planetary Prince and Adam, India became the home of the most cosmopolitan population over to be found on the face of the earth. But it was unfortunate that this mixture came to contain so much of the green, orange, and indigo races.
27When the relatively pure-line remnants of the red race forsook Asia ...These tribes were accompanied by three small groups of mixed ancestry, the largest of these being a combination of the orange and blue races. These three groups never fully fraternized with the red man and early journeyed southward to Mexico and Central America, where they were later joined by a small group of mixed yellows and reds. These peoples all intermarried and founded a new and amalgamated race, one which was much less warlike than the pure‑line red men. Within five thousand years this amalgamated race broke up into three groups, establishing the civilizations respectively of Mexico, Central America, and South America. The South American offshoot did receive a faint touch of the blood of Adam.
28. To a certain extent the early red and yellow men mingled in Asia, and the offspring to this union journeyed on to the east and along the southern seacoast and eventually, were driven by the rapidly increasing yellow race onto the peninsulas and near‑by islands of the sea. They are the present‑day brown men.
29. The remnants of the blue race left in the old Persian peninsula later amalgamated with certain others, primarily the yellow; and the resultant blend, subsequently somewhat upstepped by the violet race of Adam, has persisted as the swarthy nomadic tribes of modern Arabs.
30. An amalgamated race of rather superior potential occupies the highlands of South America.
31. Andon tribes...were the first marine adventurers. They built boats and started in search of new lands which they hoped might be free from the terrifying ice invasions. And some of them reached Iceland, others Greenland ...Subsequently some of the mixed stock of the blue man journeyed westward and amalgamated with the later‑day Eskimos, and this union was slightly beneficial to the Eskimo tribes.
32. The struggles of these early ages were characterized by courage, bravery, and even heroism. And we all regret that so many of those sterling and rugged traits of your early ancestors have been lost to the later‑day races. While we appreciate the values of many of the refinements of advancing civilizations, we miss the magnificent persistency and superb devotion of your early ancestors, which oftentimes bordered. on grandeur and sublimity.
Discussion Questions1. How can we improve the quality of the human race today using our current ethical standards?
2. To what extent is fear still handicapping humankind?
3. Why have most people historically engaged in human sacrifice?
4. How does one understand the appearance of the colored races who were unusually intelligent in one family?
5. How does one understand the appearance of outstanding leaders among the various races?
6. Will the description of the black race in the Urantia Synopsis of Papers cause more racial problems?
7. What do you think of the reasons given for the advantages of having different races?
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