Urantia Book

This learning resource is part of the School of Theology and is being organized as a typical Urantia Book study group at Wikiversity.

Proposed lessons

 * an introduction to the Urantia Book
 * Philosophy of the UB
 * Science vs Religion
 * the Universal Father, Eternal Son, and Infinite Spirit
 * the Isle of Paradise, Havona, and the seven superuniverses
 * Local Universes, Creator Sons, moronia worlds
 * Thought Adjusters, the Supreme Being, midwayers

Nature of God
According to The Urantia Book, God is the creator and upholder of all reality—an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite, and eternal spirit personality. The most fundamental teaching about God in the book is that he is a Father. "The face which the Infinite turns toward all universe personalities is the face of a Father, the Universal Father of love." Even during the development of numerous other themes in The Urantia Book, God as a loving Father is emphasized as the central, unifying attitude of God toward the universe. "God is inherently kind, naturally compassionate, and everlastingly merciful. And never is it necessary that any influence be brought to bear upon the Father to call forth his loving-kindness. The creature's need is wholly sufficient to insure the full flow of the Father's tender mercies and his saving grace. Since God knows all about his children, it is easy for him to forgive. The better man understands his neighbor, the easier it will be to forgive him, even to love him."

God is said to be an eternal mystery though because of the infinite scope of his perfection and his attributes. "God is not hiding from any of his creatures. He is unapproachable to so many orders of beings only because he "dwells in a light which no material creature can approach." The immensity and grandeur of the divine personality is beyond the grasp of the unperfected mind of evolutionary mortals."

God, according to the book, is one Deity who functions on a range of different levels of reality, both personal and impersonal. God is taught to exist in a Trinity of three perfectly individualized persons who are co-equal: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. These persons are referred to by additional titles in the book, primarily as the "Universal Father," "Eternal Son," and "Infinite Spirit." While stating that the concept of one God in three persons is difficult to fully understand, the book says that the idea "in no manner violates the truth of the divine unity. The three personalities of Paradise Deity are, in all universe reality reactions and in all creature relations, as one." The Father, Son, and Spirit are considered "existential" persons of Deity, those in existence from the eternal past to the eternal future. In addition, three persons of Deity are described who are "experiential," or incomplete and in the process of actualizing: God the Supreme, God the Ultimate, and God the Absolute. Of these three, God the Supreme, or "the Supreme Being," is given the most explanation, as the person of Deity evolving in time and space to unify finite reality and the infinite. The persons of God the Ultimate and God the Absolute are considered to be remote from the possibility of comprehension and are covered on a limited basis. Many types of celestial beings are enumerated in the book, and one of particular note is a joint "offspring" of the Universal Father and Eternal Son called a "Creator Son." A divine Creator Son is considered the full representation of the Universal Father and Eternal Son that is possible to people. Jesus of Nazareth is identified as a Creator Son who incarnated on Earth and whose life and teachings are portrayed as the fullest revelation of the personality and attitude of God ever given to humanity. The final paper states: "To "follow Jesus" means to personally share his religious faith and to enter into the spirit of the Master's life of unselfish service for man. One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it."

God and the individual
God is described as the Father of each individual, and through the direct gift of a fragment of his eternal spirit, called a Thought Adjuster, is said to be able to guide the individual toward an increased understanding of him. The Thought Adjuster is also called a "Mystery Monitor," "inner voice," "divine spark," and "pilot light." The concept is in ways comparable to the Hindu atman, the ancient Egyptian ka, and the Quaker inner light. In relation to biblical traditions, the Thought Adjuster is described by the book as the meaning behind the phrases "being made in God's image" and the "kingdom of God is within you": "The Adjuster is the mark of divinity, the presence of God. The "image of God" does not refer to physical likeness nor to the circumscribed limitations of material creature endowment but rather to the gift of the spirit presence of the Universal Father in the supernal bestowal of the Thought Adjusters upon the humble creatures of the universes."

Each person is said to receive one such fragment at the time of his or her first independent moral decision, on average around the age of five years and ten months. The Adjuster then serves noncoercively as a divine partner in the mind of the individual for the rest of life, and to the extent that a person consents with their free will to want to find God, it leads the person toward more mature, spiritualized thinking. Through the practice of learning how to follow the inner leadings of the Adjuster—choose "God's will"—the individual progresses to greater God consciousness and spiritual growth. A person's Thought Adjuster is described as distinct from either the soul or the conscience. In The Urantia Book ' s teachings, the degree to which a human mind chooses to accept its Adjuster's guidance becomes the degree to which a person's soul "grows" and becomes a reality that can then survive death. The soul is in essence an embryonic spiritual development, one parental factor being the divine Adjuster and the other being the human will. The book many times links the biblical New Testament teachings of becoming like a little child in attitude of trust and sincerity as being the stance each person should have toward God. It says the attitude of open-minded teachability facilitates spiritual growth in liaison with the work of the Thought Adjuster and invariably leads a person to love and serve other people. It also says, "But you yourself are mostly unconscious of this inner ministry. You are quite incapable of distinguishing the product of your own material intellect from that of the conjoint activities of your soul and the Adjuster." Persistently embracing sin is considered the same as rejecting the leadings of the Adjuster, rejecting the will of God. Constant selfishness and sinful choosing lead eventually to iniquity and full identification with unrighteousness, and since unrighteousness is unreal, it results in the eventual annihilation of the individual's identity. Personalities like this become "as if they never were." The book says that "in the last analysis, such sin-identified individuals have destroyed themselves by becoming wholly unreal through their embrace of iniquity." The concepts of Hell and reincarnation are not taught. From Paper 5, "God's Relation to the Individual": "The great God makes direct contact with mortal man and gives a part of his infinite and eternal and incomprehensible self to live and dwell within him. God has embarked upon the eternal adventure with man. If you yield to the leadings of the spiritual forces in you and around you, you cannot fail to attain the high destiny established by a loving God as the universe goal of his ascendant creatures from the evolutionary worlds of space."

The book says that a person ultimately is destined to fuse with his or her divine fragment and become one inseparable entity with it, if the person chooses to accept the Adjuster's leadings and become self-identified with it. The act of fusion is the moment when a human personality has successfully and unalterably won eternal life, described as typically taking place in the afterlife, but also a possibility during earthly life. The result during human life is a "fusion flash," with the material body consumed in a fiery light and the soul "translated" to the afterlife. The Hebrew prophet Elijah being taken to heaven without death in "chariots of fire" is said to be a rare example in recorded history of a person who attained fusion. Once fused with his or her fragment of God, a person continues as an ascending citizen in the universe and travels through numerous worlds on a long, adventurous pilgrimage of growth and learning that eventually leads to God and residence on Paradise. Mortals who reach this stage are called "finaliters." The book goes on to discuss the potential destinies of these "glorified mortals." The Urantia Book places much emphasis on the idea that all individuals have the same opportunity to know God, and it says nothing can hinder a human being's spiritual progression if he or she is motivated to be spirit led. The book regards human life on earth as a "short and intense test," and "is not so much a probation as an education" and the afterlife as a continuation of training that begins in material life. The "religion of Jesus" is considered to be practiced by way of loving God the Father with a person's whole being, thereby learning to love each person the way Jesus loves people; that is, recognizing others as brothers and sisters and being of unselfish service to them.

Cosmology
The book teaches that the universe is the product of intelligent and purposeful organization. and is vastly older than current scientific theories state, and that the universe is the product of intelligent and purposeful organization. Information about cosmology and astronomy is provided in parts I, II, and III of the book. The book discusses space and time, describes the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets. The authors claim that the universe is teeming with intelligent life located mainly on the planets of extrasolar planetary systems. The book describes that at the center of the cosmos is the stationary Isle of Paradise — the dwelling place of God — with Paradise being surrounded by "Havona," a created universe containing a billion perfect worlds, around which seven evolutionary "superuniverses" circle. All the groupings of galaxies of inhabited and uninhabited universes circle around the Isle of Paradise, the gravitational center of the universe, which some Urantia Book readers believe is located in Great Attractor. The term "universe" in the book is used to denote a number of different scales of organization. A "superuniverse" is roughly the size of a galaxy or group of galaxies, and the seven superuniverses along with Paradise-Havona are together designated as the "grand universe." A "local universe" is a portion of a superuniverse, with 100,000 local universes being in each superuniverse. Beyond the seven superuniverses, enormous uninhabited "outer space levels" are described. The term "master universe" refers to what in modern usage would be the total universe — all existing matter and space taken as a whole. The physical size of a local universe is not directly stated, but each is said to have up to 10 million inhabited worlds. Urantia is said to be located in a remote local universe named "Nebadon," which itself is part of superuniverse number seven, "Orvonton." The book discusses alternative explanations for the universe's origin and offers explanations for some observed astronomical phenomena. For example, the book claims that astronomic redshift arises from "numerous factors of error" and is "wholly unreliable" beyond nearby galaxies, the greatest distortion being caused by the seven superuniverses revolving around Paradise in the direction opposite from the galaxies in the "outer space levels."

Science
The book attempts to synchronize religion, science and philosophy and many statements about science appear in the text. "The ideal human estate is that in which philosophy, religion, and science are welded into a meaningful unity.." "Science teaches man to speak the new language of mathematics and trains his thoughts along lines of exacting precision. And science also stabilizes philosophy through the elimination of error, while it purifies religion by the destruction of superstition." The book holds science in high regard, however it opposes the purely materialistic science. About conflict between science and religion the book states: "In reality, true religion cannot become involved in any controversy with science; it is in no way concerned with material things." The Urantia Book debunks astrology as "pseudo science of Babylon" and also states: "But the frank, honest, and fearless search for true causes gave birth to modern science: It turned astrology into astronomy, alchemy into chemistry, and magic into medicine." In Paper 101, "The Real Nature of Religion," the authors write: "We full well know that, while the historic facts and religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the records of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our statements regarding the physical sciences will stand in need of revision in consequence of additional scientific developments and new discoveries. These new developments we even now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly undiscovered facts in the revelatory records. Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is not inspired."

The only apparent anticipation of science the book has made, in Gardner's opinion, is that it says the magnetic sense that homing pigeons possess is "not wholly wanting as a conscious possession by mankind." In 1980, a British zoologist, Robin Baker, published evidence that humans have a limited magnetic sense. Kary Mullis a Nobel Prize winning American biochemist indicates on his personal website a striking coincidences between a story of Adam and Eve in The Urantia Book and the finding published in "Science": 309 (2005) that a variant of a gene that regulates brain size arose roughly 37,000 years ago with a 95% confidence interval of 14,000 to 60,000 years. According to The Urantia Book: "Adam and Eve arrived on Urantia, from the year A.D. 1934, 37,848 years ago". Mark McMenamin, a professor of geology, quotes a section of the book describing a billion-year-old supercontinent that subsequently split apart, forming ocean basins where early marine life developed. He says, "This amazing passage, written in the 1930s, anticipates scientific results that did not actually appear in the scientific literature until many decades later." McMenamin also states, "Of course I am being selective here in my choice of quotations, and there are reams of scientifically untenable material in The Urantia Book." In his book Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet Ted Nield comments on McMenamin's statement, saying "These quotations are selective, of course, which is always the key to making the prophecies of mystics look 'uncanny' If you look at other parts of the same passage from which those quotations come, you can find a rich and colourful mixture of half-correct ideas and plain nonsense... But the trick of a successful prophet is to say enough things, and to phrase them sufficiently elliptically, so that the occasional correct hits within the general rambling leap out at the prepared mind - just like cloud patterns, or the face of the Man in the Moon." In this case, he says, both scientists and mystics "apparently independently 'discovered'" this supercontinent, "and it was the mystics who sleepwalked there first." Adherents believe that there are some examples of scientific foreknowledge in The Urantia Book.

History and future of the world
The book's extensive teachings about the history of the Earth include its physical development about 4.5 billion years ago, the gradual changes in conditions that allowed life to develop, and long ages of organic evolution that started with microscopic marine life and led to plant and animal life in the oceans, later on land. The emergence of humans is presented as having occurred about a million years ago from a branch of superior primates originating from a lemur ancestor. The Urantia Book says "this story is graphically told within the fossil pages of the vast 'stone book' of world record ... the pages of this gigantic biogeologic record unfailingly tell the truth if you but acquire skill in their interpretation." Unlike current scientific views, evolution is said to be orderly and controlled. Primordial life is taught to have been intelligently planned, implanted, and monitored by "Life Carriers," instead of arising spontaneously. The book says that "mortal man is not an evolutionary accident," and that the purpose of evolution on a planet such as Urantia is to produce creatures of "will dignity" that can develop spiritual natures and survive material existence, going on to have eternal spiritual careers. The Urantia Book teaches not only biological evolution, but that human society and spiritual understandings evolve by slow progression, subject both to periods of rapid improvement and the possibility of retrogression. Progress is said to follow a divine plan that includes periodic gifts of revelation and ministry by heavenly teachers, which eventually will lead to an ideal world status of "light and life" in the far distant future. Though there is the ideal and divine plan, it is said to be fostered and administered by various orders of celestial beings who are not always perfect. Through mistakes or deliberate rebellion, the plan can be wrecked, requiring long spans of time to recoup lost progress. Urantia is said to be a markedly "dark and confused" planet that is "greatly retarded in all phases of intellectual progress and spiritual attainment" compared to more typical inhabited worlds, due to an unusually severe history of rebellion and default by its spiritual supervisors. The Urantia Book describes the successive eras of biologic, intellectual, and spiritual uplifting as "epochal revelations" of God and his ministering agents to man. According to The Urantia Book the Lucifer Rebellion was a disruption of God's divine plan in the history of Urantia. In the book, Lucifer is classified as a "Primary Lanonandek Son" and head administrator of his attending system. He proposed the concepts of personal liberty, self-autonomy, and self-assertion. These concepts were adopted on Urantia first by the head of its human affairs, Caligastia. By joining Lucifer, Caligastia caused the eventual collapse of the same fragile civilization he had come to guide as "Planetary Prince" of the realm. The Urantia Book emphasizes that despite its dark history, Urantia has been the beneficiary of much good. The life of Jesus, designated in The Urantia Book as the "fourth epochal revelation," is said to have redeemed the planet of the blunders of rebellion. "And when Jesus came down from his sojourn on Mount Hermon, the Lucifer rebellion in Satania and the Caligastia secession on Urantia were virtually settled."

Life and teachings of Jesus
More than one third of the content of the book (Part IV) is devoted to a narrative of the life and teachings of Jesus. From his birth in Bethlehem and infancy in Alexandria, the story extends through his years of school in Nazareth and his work as a young carpenter after the death of his father Joseph, in order to sustain his widowed mother and eight brothers and sisters. Topics include a girl Rebecca who fell in love with him, and Jesus's rejection of her proposal for marriage. Jesus is said to have traveled around the Mediterranean Basin (Alexandria, Rome, Athens etc. ) and regions of the Middle East (Mesopotamia and Caspian Sea region) in his late 20s, and after these trips, the narrative begins to parallel what is depicted in the New Testament, but with numerous extra details. John the Baptist and the twelve Apostles are people of flesh and blood with their virtues and flaws. Jesus's teachings, as presented to his apostles and followers, is exhaustive, enlarged and presented in contemporary language. The work of the Women's Evangelistic Corps appointed by Jesus is also narrated. As Jesus's mission on Earth, the book describes the seventh bestowal of a Creator Son. Each Creator Son can rule his part of the universe – (termed the "local universe") – after completing seven bestowals, the final of them is in the likeness of mortal flesh. This is the one of reasons why the Creator Son came to Earth – Urantia. The other purpose of his mission is stated in the book: "A Creator Son did not incarnate in the likeness of mortal flesh and bestow himself upon the humanity of Urantia to reconcile an angry God but rather to win all mankind to the recognition of the Father's love and to the realization of their sonship with God." The core of Jesus's teaching is that men are children of God and their fellows are their brethren in one big family; when Jesus is their elder brother. The idea of the kingdom of God as presented by Jesus is the spiritual rule of Heavenly Father in the hearts of men, but many of his followers misinterpret this idea as a purely earthly kingdom. The book states that today Christianity is rather a religion about Jesus instead religion of Jesus – his original teaching – which the book reinstates.

Miscellaneous links

 * Glossary of terms
 * Urantia United - seems to be defunct