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Robert Benchley once wrote that there are many mysteries which humans haven't fathomed, and added: "Some of them might not be also 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. A more sophisticated 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 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 prior to 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. 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 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 from 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 in the movie The Road to Wellville, who lurks around 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 in a 472-page MS dictated by Higher Intelligences and written out by his own hand while asleep one evening....
A cult was born. The divinely authored UB continued to grow. Only wicked sceptics would listen to the rumour that mere humans were encouraged 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 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, once the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, including a damning list 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 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, this is because UB does not dispense "unearned" knowledge (except sometimes): humanity must find 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 prevent 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 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, an american judge declared the UB to be in the public domain -- though why anyone should want 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, however the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it isn't funny enough: more 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, not as 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 definitely 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 towards the humour of it all. Better organization may have helped: tighter editing, a topic index to 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, an enormous sledgehammer is being delivered to bear on a few minor nuts.
