TuggleShell714
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Robert Benchley once wrote that there are many mysteries which humans have not fathomed, and added: "Some of these might not even be worth fathoming." These words occasionally spring 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 known as the "Great I Am"; prophecies and revelations; a revisionist life of Christ; and so forth. Weird neologisms abound, as with Scientology ("Urantia" is merely Earth), and 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, the thing is, it is an piece of faith that the text was finalized in 1934.
The roots of UB go deeper, and Gardner relentlessly explores them. In the 1800s 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 relative 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 prepared by their own hand while asleep one night....
A cult was created. The divinely authored UB grew even larger. Only wicked sceptics would pay attention to the rumour that mere humans were asked to contribute bits, or even lots.
Various text comparisons, discussed here at gruelling length and based on computer analysis, suggest to the eye of unfaith that Sadler wrote large chunks of UB and personally re-edited the whole book. Their 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, once the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, together with a damning list of platitudes lifted straight from the very first 33 pages of one particular dictionary of quotations.
Block's faith was only strengthened by his discovery of the Higher Intelligences' cleverness in using 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 have to get 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 united states 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, a US judge declared the UB to be in the general public domain -- though why anyone should want 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 not detectably life-threatening (yes, the Branch Davidians and Waco get dragged in at some point, but the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it's not funny enough: more than once Gardner feels the necessity to pep some misconception by invoking his fictitious numerologist Dr Matrix, to little effect. I really hope he's joking when he argues -- as Gardner, not as the charlatan Matrix -- that the UB sequence of seven small numbers, followed after undisclosed intervals by a 6-digit and then a 7-digit number, is definitely an intentional "signature" of Wilfred Custer Kellogg (7, 6 and 7 letters). This is tenuous to the point of vacuity.
Although Urantia contains fascinating and entertaining segments, the sheer weight of lovingly researched, meticulously reproduced documentation forms a leaden ballast towards the humour of it all. Better organization might have helped: tighter editing, a subject index to really make it usable like a reference work, a family-tree chart to clarify the relationships of all a lot of Kelloggs. Ultimately, one give in to saying, a massive sledgehammer is being delivered to bear on the few minor nuts.
