HolteHarter169
出典: くみこみックス
Robert Benchley once wrote there are many mysteries which humans have not fathomed, and added: "Some of these may not even be worth fathoming." These words occasionally come 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 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 known as the "Great I Am"; prophecies and revelations; a revisionist life of Christ; and so on. Weird neologisms abound, as in 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's an article 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 producing 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 within the UB movement.
The story would be that the first inklings of 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 within the movie The Road 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, 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 evening....
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 supported by 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 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 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 your 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 merely "time bombs" inserted to encourage human self-reliance and prevent people treating UB as inerrant truth -- which some nevertheless do.
Inevitably the UB movement suffered schisms. The funniest of these involve the united states Urantia Foundation's attempts to preserve rigid copyright charge of a holy book whose authors are, officially, intangible astral entities. You will find 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 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 one point, however the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it isn't funny enough: more than once Gardner feels the need to pep things up 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 7 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 may have helped: tighter editing, a topic index to really make it usable as a reference work, a family-tree chart to clarify 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.
