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Notes of a Fringe-Watcher MARTIN GARDNER

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Notes of a Fringe-Watcher MARTIN GARDNER Notes of a Fringe-Watcher MARTIN GARDNER The Great Urantia Mystery o holy Bible offered to the The book's first two thirds concern Western world in the past few cosmology and the history of Urantia N centuries is thicker, heavier, or (pronounced you-ran'-sha), the name stranger than The Urantia Book. This for Earth. We live on the 606th planet 2,097-page, 4.3-lb. volume purports to in a system called Satania, which be written entirely by extraterrestrials includes 619 imperfect, evolving and channeled through an unknown worlds. Urantia's grand universe earthling. To members of the Urantia number is 5,342,482,337,666. Satan- Brotherhood, a steadily, quietly grow- ia, with its headquarters at Jerusem, ing cult headquartered in Chicago, the is in the constellation of Norlatiadek, book supposedly contains the earth's part of the evolving universe of fifth revelation from God, superior to Nebadon. Nebadon in turn belongs to mainline Christianity and destined to a superuniverse called Orvonton. transform the world. Orvonton and six other superuni- Nothing could persuade me to read verses, each unfinished and still every line of this monstrous mish- evolving, revolve around the central mash of claptrap interspersed with universe of Havona. At the core of puddles of pious platitudes, but I have Havona is the flat, timeless, motion- perused it carefully enough to get the less Isle of Paradise. This is the drift of its wild science-fiction themes. dwelling place of the Great I AM, the In a way, the book is more amusing ultimate, eternal, infinite Deity. His than the Book of Mormon, translated triune nature (Father, Son, and Spirit) from hieroglyphics by Joseph Smith is symbolized on the Brotherhood's with the aid of a pair of magic stationery by three concentric blue spectacles called the Urim and the circles. Thummim. It is almost as funny as The Urantia Book swarms with a the ravings of L. Ron Hubbard or Sun thousand neologisms, but they lack Moon, the channeled fiddle-faddle of the music of the made-up names in Jane Roberts or J. Zebra Knight, or the fantasies of Lord Dunsany or the work of such earlier mountebanks James Branch Cabell and the punning as Mary Baker Eddy and Madame humor of Finnegans Wake. Below I AM Blavatsky. Indeed it may be the are billions of lesser gods and angels, largest, most fantastic chunk of including a finite deity who is evolving channeled moonshine ever to be toward becoming the Supreme Being bound in one volume. of all evolving universes. Pages would 124 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 14 be needed to list all their generic "repersonalized" and live in Jerusem. names. There are the Truth Reveal- Like the Koran and the Book of ers, the Mystery Monitors, the Uni- Mormon, The Urantia Book retells Old versal Censors, the Divine Coun- Testament yarns, but with many more selors, the Perfectors of Wisdom, the corrections and embellishments. Ancient of Days, and a hundred Human souls are created at birth. others. When we die, our souls and their Technical Advisors include Super- Thought Adjusters survive. Thought naphim, Seconaphim, Tertiaphim, Adjusters are indwelling "fragments" Omniaphim, Seraphim, Cherubim, of God. In due time we are reas- and Sanobim. The Master Physical sembled on another planet, the start Controllers (some are machines) are of a long series of reincarnations from the Power Directors, Mechanical planet to planet, universe to universe, Controllers, Energy Transformers, until we finally reach Paradise, where Energy Transmitters, Primary Asso- we fuse with God. Guardian angels ciators, Secondary Associators, Fran- and indwelling Thought Adjusters dalanks, and Chronoldeks. On help us along the way. The pilgrimage Urantia's Advisory Council are is not monotonous. There will be Onagar, Masant, Onamonalonton, endless adventures and surprises. Orlandof, Porshsunta, Singlangton, Neologisms contaminate every Fantad, Orvonon, Adam, Eve, Enoch, page: mind-gravity circuit, absonity, Moses, Elijah, Machiventa Melchiz- reflectivity, trinitization, eventuation, edek, John the Baptist, and 1-2-3 the finaliters, abandonters, tabamantia, First. midwayers, grandfada, everywhere- Lucifer, one of three archangels ness, ultimate quartan integration, who rebelled, is now the deposed and hundreds more. The authors of sovereign of Satania, named after what cult members call "The Papers" Satan, his first lieutenant. Under have a curious compulsion to divide Satan are lesser rebels, such as Cali- things into sevens. The Thought gastia and Beelzebub. All these fallen Adjusters, for instance, come in seven angels are now imprisoned on Satania. flavors: virgin, advanced, supreme, Some have repented. Those who vanished, liberated, fused, and person- never repent will eventually be anni- alized. Here is a sample gem of opaque hilated. prose: Urantia's first two humans were not Adam and Eve. They were the The triodity of actuality continues black-eyed twins Andon and Fonta, to function directly in the post- children of beasts. The Garden of Havona epochs; Paradise gravity Eden was not established until almost grasps the basic units of material existence, the spirit gravity of the a million years later. Adam and Eve Eternal Son operates directly upon were eight feet tall, had blue eyes, and the fundamental values of spirit bodies that shimmered with light. existence, and the mind gravity of Their offspring founded what the the Conjoint Actor unerringly book calls the "Violet race." Although clutches all vital meanings of intel- Adam and Eve disobeyed higher lectual existence. authorities by eating the forbidden fruit, there was no "fall of man." It There are huge sections of phony is unthinkable that a loving God would science. X-rays, we are told, disinte- allow us to suffer for the sins of Adam grate atoms at the sun's core. The and Eve. The pair have since been sun's "crust" as well as the entire Winter 1990 125 cosmos is permeated with calcium. An electron consists of a hundred smaller units called "ultimatons." And so on. The last third of the book fleshes out in vast detail the life and teachings of Jesus. It seems that Paul, Peter, and others outrageously distorted this history, but records supplied by the guardian angel of the Apostle Andrew have set matters straight. We learn such things as that the young Jesus toured the Roman world accompanied by Gonad and Ganid, natives of India. The Man of Galilee was none other than Michael of Nebadon, one of hundreds of thousands of Sons of the Eternal Son, who is part of the ultimate trinity. He was the creator William S. Sadler (1964) of our local universe. Coming to Urantia was his seventh and last is gaining new recruits, thanks to the incarnation as one of God's creatures. current channeling craze. More inter- Many of Jesus' miracles had natural estingly, the book's origin is a capital explanations. He did not turn water mystery. No one knows who wrote to wine—he just called for wine—but it. the miracle of the loaves and fishes The book was published in 1955 was genuine. After he cured a lunatic, at the instigation of one of the a dog chased a herd of swine into the strangest characters in our nation's sea, giving rise to the legend that religious history. He was William devils left the man to enter the pigs. Samuel Sadler (1875-1969), surgeon, Lazarus was the only person Jesus psychiatrist, and one-time ordained raised from the dead (the others were Seventh-Day Adventist minister who merely sleeping). Thanks to Lazarus's held prominent posts in Adventist Personalized Adjuster, he was allowed hospitals. He was a close associate of to reenter his corpse. He lived to be the church's inspired prophetess Ellen 67, finally dying of the same disease Gould White. Because Adventists that first killed him. vigorously condemn Spiritualism and Although Jesus was crucified, his the occult, Sadler was impelled to death was in no way a sacrificial blood write two books debunking such atonement. Original sin is another of things: The Truth About Spiritualism the Bible's grave errors. After Christ's (1923) and The Mind at Mischief: Tricks death, entities rolled the stone from and Deceptions of the Subconscious and How the sepulchre and snatched his body. to Cope with Them (1929). When Jesus reappeared to his follow- In an Appendix to The Mind at ers, it was in a reconstituted form. Mischief Sadler writes that with one Eventually he will return to Urantia, or two exceptions "all cases of psychic but we have no inkling of when or phenomena which have come under where. my observation have turned out to Why do I waste time on such a be those of auto-psychism." By this pretentious, preposterous tome? Two he means the influence of the subcon- reasons. One, the Urantia movement scious. One phenomenon he could not 126 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 14 debunk involved an unnamed man who while in a deep trance became a "clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extraplanetary per- sonalities." Sadler goes on to say that "all the information imparted through this source has proved to be consistent within itself. ... It is essentially Christian and is, on the whole, entirely harmonious with the known scientific facts and truths of this age." Was this unknown man Sadler himself? Could it have been his wife, her identity concealed by calling her a man? (His wife, Lena Kellogg, was the niece of Dr. John Kellogg, creator of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. He was a William S. Sadler, Jr. loyal Adventist until Ellen White These higher beings have refused to excommunicated him.) All we know use their own names and have only is that in the early twenties Sadler specified their type of being in the started in Chicago a group of some universe.
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