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Robert Benchley once wrote there are many mysteries which humans have not fathomed, and added: "Some of them 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 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 with a supreme being ingenuously known as the "Great I Am"; prophecies and revelations; a revisionist lifetime of Christ; and so on. Weird neologisms abound, as in Scientology ("Urantia" is merely Earth), and therefore are gleefully quoted. Outsiders find it 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 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 within 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 of 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 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 their own hand while sleeping one night....
A cult was born. The divinely authored UB continued to grow. Only wicked sceptics would pay attention 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 entire 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 1 particular dictionary of quotations.
Block's faith was just 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 does not 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. Easily 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, a US judge declared the UB to stay in the general 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 some point, but the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it's not funny enough: more than once Gardner feels the necessity to pep things up by invoking his fictitious numerologist Dr Matrix, to little effect. I really 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 and then a 7-digit number, is definitely 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 subject index to 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 is being delivered to bear on a few minor nuts.
