JohnnaPoor82
Aus DCPedia
Robert Benchley once wrote that there are many mysteries which humans have not fathomed, and added: "Some of them may not even be worth fathoming." These words occasionally spring to mind during Martin Gardner's lengthy, painstakingly researched investigation from 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 with a supreme being ingenuously called the "Great I Am"; prophecies and revelations; a revisionist lifetime of Christ; and so on. Weird neologisms abound, as in Scientology ("Urantia" is merely Earth), and therefore are gleefully quoted. Outsiders think it is odd that some regard the UB as validated by its predictions of scientific developments before the 1955 publication date. For UB fundamentalists, you see, it is an article of faith the text was finalized in 1934.
The roots of UB go deeper, and Gardner relentlessly explores them. Within the 19th century 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 from the Adventists but ironically -- as Gardner persuasively argues -- re-enacted White's autocracy and compulsive plagiarism within the UB movement.
The story would be that the first inklings of the UB were "channelled" while asleep by Sadler's brother-in-law Wilfred Custer Kellogg -- a family member of the Dr John Kellogg of bowel-obsession fame, recently portrayed within the movie The direction to Wellville, who lurks on the fringes of this story and whose moderately irrelevant health fads earn him an entertaining chapter here. This channelling began in 1911 or 1912, having 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 written out by their own hand while sleeping one night....
A cult was born. The divinely authored UB continued to grow. Only wicked sceptics would listen to the rumour that mere humans were asked to contribute bits, as well as lots.
Various text comparisons, discussed at gruelling length and supported by computer analysis, suggest to the eye of unfaith that Sadler wrote large chunks of UB and personally re-edited the entire book. His own writings are visibly recycled, including ugly racist views and a powerful flavour of Adventism. Other contributors pinched material from further afield. The bombshell came in 1992, once the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, including a damning listing of platitudes lifted straight from the first 33 pages of one particular dictionary of quotations.
Block's faith was just strengthened by his discovery from the Higher Intelligences' cleverness in using mere human words for their awesome purposes. UB fundamentalists are similarly unimpressed with this gospel's scientific deficiencies, also voluminously discussed here. If a prediction is correct, UB is confirmed. If something is missing which Higher Intelligences should logically have told us, the reason being UB doesn't dispense "unearned" knowledge (except sometimes): humanity have to get out the painfully costly 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. Easily the funniest of those involve the US Urantia Foundation's attempts to preserve rigid copyright charge of a holy book whose authors are, officially, intangible astral entities. There's even a punchline: in February 1995, a US judge declared the UB to be in the 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 short of major new targets. The UB cult is mildly funny and never detectably life-threatening (yes, the Branch Davidians and Waco get dragged in at one point, but the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it's not funny enough: more 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 when he argues -- as Gardner, less 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 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 to the humour of it all. Better organization may have helped: tighter editing, a subject index to make it usable like a reference work, a family-tree chart to explain the relationships of all too many Kelloggs. Ultimately, one give in to saying, a massive sledgehammer is being delivered to bear on a few minor nuts.
