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Robert Benchley once wrote that there are many mysteries which humans have not fathomed, and added: "Some of them might not even be 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 two,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 called the "Great I Am"; prophecies and revelations; a revisionist life of Christ; and so forth. Weird neologisms abound, as in Scientology ("Urantia" is just 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 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 is that the first inklings of the UB were "channelled" during sleep by Sadler's brother-in-law Wilfred Custer Kellogg -- a family member from the Dr John Kellogg of bowel-obsession fame, recently portrayed within the movie The Road 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 written out by their own hand while asleep one night....

[http://gabrielbates482.posterous.com/a-review-of-the-urantia-book The Urantia Book reviews]

A cult was created. The divinely authored UB continued to grow. Only wicked sceptics would listen 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 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 came in 1992, when 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 1 particular dictionary of quotations.

Block's faith was just strengthened by his discovery from the Higher Intelligences' cleverness in making use of mere human words for their awesome purposes. UB fundamentalists are similarly unimpressed with 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 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 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 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 be in the general public domain -- though why anyone should want it beats me.

Martin Gardner has spent 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 one point, however the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it's not funny enough: more often 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 7 small numbers, followed after undisclosed intervals by 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 to the humour from 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 too many Kelloggs. Ultimately, one give in to saying, an enormous sledgehammer is being delivered to bear on a few minor nuts.

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NicholsonLorenz959: Created page with ' Robert Benchley once wrote that there are many mysteries which humans have not fathomed, and added: "Some of them might not even be worth fathoming." These words occasional…'