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Robert Benchley once wrote that there are many mysteries which humans haven't fathomed, and added: "Some of them might not even be worth fathoming." These words occasionally come to mind during Martin Gardner's lengthy, painstakingly researched investigation of The Urantia Book and its smallish surrounding cult.
The UB was published in 1955 and runs to 2,097 pages of fairly standard holy-book material. An elaborate celestial hierarchy of swarming godlings and angel-analogues ruled by a supreme being ingenuously called the "Great I Am"; prophecies and revelations; a revisionist life of Christ; and so forth. Weird neologisms abound, as in Scientology ("Urantia" is merely Earth), and therefore are gleefully quoted. Outsiders find it odd that some regard the UB as validated by its predictions of scientific developments prior to the 1955 publication date. For UB fundamentalists, the thing is, it is an piece of faith the text was finalized in 1934.
The roots of UB go deeper, and Gardner relentlessly explores them. Within the 1800s we meet Sister Ellen White, prophetess of Seventh Day Adventism (itself a splinter cult formed within the wake of William Miller's dud prophecy that Christ would return in 1844), issuing contradictory decrees direct from God and churning out sacred writings by shameless plagiarism. One disciple, Dr William Sadler, broke loose in the Adventists but ironically -- as Gardner persuasively argues -- re-enacted White's autocracy and compulsive plagiarism in the UB movement.
The story would be that the first inklings from the UB were "channelled" while asleep by Sadler's brother-in-law Wilfred Custer Kellogg -- a family member from the Dr John Kellogg of bowel-obsession fame, recently portrayed in the movie The direction to Wellville, who lurks on the fringes of the story and whose moderately irrelevant health fads earn him an entertaining chapter here. This channelling began in 1911 or 1912, with a spurt in 1923 when Sadler's religious discussion group posed 4,000 questions which Wilfred supposedly answered inside a 472-page MS dictated by Higher Intelligences and prepared by his own hand while asleep one night....
A cult was created. The divinely authored UB continued to grow. Only wicked sceptics would listen to the rumour that mere humans were encouraged to contribute bits, as well as lots.
Various text comparisons, discussed at gruelling length and based on computer analysis, suggest towards the eye of unfaith that Sadler wrote large chunks of UB and personally re-edited the entire book. Their own writings are visibly recycled, including ugly racist views and a powerful flavour of Adventism. Other contributors pinched material from further afield. The bombshell arrived 1992, once the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, together with a damning list of platitudes lifted completely from the very first 33 pages of one particular dictionary of quotations.
Block's faith was just strengthened by his discovery from the Higher Intelligences' cleverness in making use of mere human words for his or her awesome purposes. UB fundamentalists are similarly unimpressed with this gospel's scientific deficiencies, also voluminously discussed here. If your prediction is correct, UB is confirmed. If something is missing which Higher Intelligences should logically have told us, the reason being UB does not dispense "unearned" knowledge (except sometimes): humanity must find out the hard way. Gross scientific errors, like mixing up Fahrenheit and Kelvin for stellar temperatures, are only "time bombs" inserted to encourage human self-reliance and stop people treating UB as inerrant truth -- which some nevertheless do.
Inevitably the UB movement suffered schisms. The funniest of these involve the US Urantia Foundation's tries to preserve rigid copyright control of a holy book whose authors are, officially, intangible astral entities. There's even a punchline: in February 1995, an american judge declared the UB to stay in the general public domain -- though why anyone should need it beats me.
Martin Gardner has spent a lot more than 40 years boldly and effectively attacking the dragons of irrationality ... but finally, perhaps, he's running lacking major new targets. The UB cult is mildly funny and not detectably life-threatening (yes, the Branch Davidians and Waco get dragged in at some point, however the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it isn't funny enough: more often than once Gardner feels the need to pep things up by invoking his fictitious numerologist Dr Matrix, to little effect. I really hope he's joking as he argues -- as Gardner, not as the charlatan Matrix -- that the UB sequence of 7 small numbers, followed after undisclosed intervals by a 6-digit after which a 7-digit number, is an intentional "signature" of Wilfred Custer Kellogg (7, 6 and 7 letters). This really is tenuous to begin vacuity.
Although Urantia contains fascinating and entertaining segments, the sheer weight of lovingly researched, meticulously reproduced documentation forms a leaden ballast towards the humour from it all. Better organization might have helped: tighter editing, a topic index to really make it usable like a reference work, a family-tree chart to clarify the relationships of a lot of Kelloggs. Ultimately, one can't resist saying, a massive sledgehammer has been delivered to bear on the few minor nuts.
