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Robert Benchley once wrote there are many mysteries which humans have not fathomed, and added: "Some of them may not be also worth fathoming." These words occasionally come to mind during Martin Gardner's lengthy, painstakingly researched investigation from the Urantia Book and it is smallish surrounding cult.
The UB was published in 1955 and runs to two,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 lifetime of Christ; and so forth. Weird neologisms abound, as with Scientology ("Urantia" is just Earth), and are gleefully quoted. Outsiders think it is odd that some regard the UB as validated by its predictions of scientific developments prior to the 1955 publication date. For UB fundamentalists, you see, it's an piece of faith that 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 in 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 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 around 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 evening....
A cult was created. The divinely authored UB continued to grow. Only wicked sceptics would pay attention to the rumour that mere humans were encouraged to contribute bits, or even lots.
Various text comparisons, discussed here 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 whole book. His own writings are visibly recycled, including ugly racist views along with a powerful flavour of Adventism. Other contributors pinched material from further afield. The bombshell arrived 1992, when the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, together with a damning listing of platitudes lifted completely from the first 33 pages of 1 particular dictionary of quotations.
Block's faith was only strengthened by his discovery of the Higher Intelligences' cleverness in making use of mere human words for his or her awesome purposes. UB fundamentalists are similarly unimpressed by 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 must find out the painfully costly way. Gross scientific errors, like mixing up Fahrenheit and Kelvin for stellar temperatures, are merely "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 more than forty 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 some point, however the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it's not funny enough: more often than once Gardner feels the necessity to pep some misconception by invoking his fictitious numerologist Dr Matrix, to little effect. I hope he's joking as he argues -- as Gardner, less the charlatan Matrix -- that a UB sequence of seven small numbers, followed after undisclosed intervals with 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 to the humour of it all. Better organization might have helped: tighter editing, a topic index to make it usable as a reference work, a family-tree chart to explain the relationships of a lot of Kelloggs. Ultimately, one can't resist saying, an enormous sledgehammer is being delivered to bear on the few minor nuts.
