LavenaTreadwell942

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   Robert Benchley once wrote that there are many mysteries which humans haven't fathomed, and added: "Some of these might not be also worth fathoming." These words occasionally spring to mind during Martin Gardner's lengthy, painstakingly researched investigation of The Urantia Book and it is 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 lifetime of Christ; and so forth. Weird neologisms abound, as in Scientology ("Urantia" is just Earth), and are gleefully quoted. Outsiders find it 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 piece of faith 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 producing 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 from the UB were "channelled" during sleep by Sadler's brother-in-law Wilfred Custer Kellogg -- a family member of the Dr John Kellogg of bowel-obsession fame, recently portrayed in 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 sleeping one evening....

Book Urantia

   A cult was born. 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, when the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, including a damning listing 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 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 a 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 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 those involve the US Urantia Foundation's attempts 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 stay in the general public domain -- though why anyone should need it beats me.

   Martin Gardner has spent a lot more than forty 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 one point, however the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it isn't 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 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 and then 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 as a reference work, a family-tree chart to explain the relationships of all a lot of Kelloggs. Ultimately, one give in to saying, an enormous sledgehammer has been delivered to bear on a few minor nuts.