CarrawaySamuelson637

   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. An elaborate 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 just 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 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 churning out 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 is 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 in a 472-page MS dictated by Higher Intelligences and written out by his own hand while asleep one evening....

Urantia Book

   A cult was created. The divinely authored UB grew even larger. Only wicked sceptics would listen to the rumour that mere humans were asked to contribute bits, as well as lots.

   Various text comparisons, discussed at gruelling length and based on computer analysis, suggest towards the eye of unfaith that Sadler wrote large chunks of UB and personally re-edited the entire 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 arrived 1992, once the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, together with a damning list of platitudes lifted completely 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 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 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 merely "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 united states Urantia Foundation's tries to preserve rigid copyright control 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 be 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 lacking 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 isn't funny enough: more than once Gardner feels the necessity to pep things up 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 a UB sequence of seven 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 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 explain the relationships of too many Kelloggs. Ultimately, one give in to saying, a massive sledgehammer has been delivered to bear on a few minor nuts.