Urantia Book - Who Could've Hoaxed This?

[Majeston]

BTW what happened to Saitia?

Out of all the replies here he apparently knew this book; It's implications and it's purpose better than everyone else on this board.

Seems to me a bit like jesus being crucified by the Jews and Romans; the ruling powers of the day.

Apparently Saitia didn't believe the book to be a hoax. Is that why he was run off?

 

:naughty:

[InfiniteNow]

BTW what happened to Saitia?

Who's Satia? Was he a member here? Oh, I just looked up and remembered... I guess he's out there somewhere. :naughty:

 

I know it's hard to figure out why it would happen, but some people do, in fact, leave Hypography by choice. Silly misguided souls... :evil:

[Turtle]

BTW what happened to Saitia?

Out of all the replies here he apparently knew this book; It's implications and it's purpose better than everyone else on this board.

Seems to me a bit like jesus being crucified by the Jews and Romans; the ruling powers of the day.

Apparently Saitia didn't believe the book to be a hoax. Is that why he was run off?

 

;)

 

There exists no end of web sites discussing Urantia as if it was a real revelation. The premise of this thread is that it is a hoax and that there likely exists historical accounts that can reveal who hoaxed it. Moreover, the hoaxer(s) by virtue of the negative conotation of 'hoax' have nothing less in mind than obfuscation, not enlightenment, and a true understanding of their intention(s) is likely found in the historical context of the book's authoring. :cup:

[Majeston]

Quote:

 

 

 

Originally Posted by Turtle

 

I tell you the Bible is crap, the Vedas are crap, the Quran is crap, LaoTzu's I Ching is crap, the Book of Morman is crap, the Urantia Book is crap, and any & all written works claiming some invisible oober powerful creature dictated it, is...well, crap.

 

 

 

 

 

:)

 

 

really turtle what is your point? I fail to understand why you even read anything spiritual. Why waste your time? Stick to what you know because nothing you have to say about anything in the spiritual realm could ever have any credibility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

130:4.4 A one-eyed person can never hope to visualize depth of perspective. Neither can single-eyed material scientists nor single-eyed spiritual mystics and allegorists correctly visualize and adequately comprehend the true depths of universe reality. All true values of creature experience are concealed in depth of recognition.

 

130:4.5 Mindless causation cannot evolve the refined and complex from the crude and the simple, neither can spiritless experience evolve the divine characters of eternal survival from the material minds of the mortals of time. The one attribute of the universe which so exclusively characterizes the infinite Deity is this unending creative bestowal of personality which can survive in progressive Deity attainment.

 

130:4.6 Personality is that cosmic endowment, that phase of universal reality, which can coexist with unlimited change and at the same time retain its identity in the very presence of all such changes, and forever afterward.

 

130:4.7 Life is an adaptation of the original cosmic causation to the demands and possibilities of universe situations, and it comes into being by the action of the Universal Mind and the activation of the spirit spark of the God who is spirit. The meaning of life is its adaptability; the value of life is its progressability -- even to the heights of God-consciousness.

[InfiniteNow]

I tell you the Bible is crap, the Vedas are crap, the Quran is crap, LaoTzu's I Ching is crap, the Book of Morman is crap, the Urantia Book is crap, and any & all written works claiming some invisible oober powerful creature dictated it, is...well, crap.

 

really turtle what is your point?

 

I'm not a genius or anything, but I'd suggest his point was that all of those spiritual texts and all written works claiming some invisible uberpowerful creature dictated them are crap. Not really sure though...

 

 

I fail to understand why you even read anything spiritual. Why waste your time?

Probably to understand why it has such great authority on the hearts and minds of people in society, and form his own conclusion regarding it's worth and merit. Your comment is like asking why people study history if they feel it was written with bias. The wise mind absorbs information from all contexts and perspectives, and once they have separated the wheat from the chaff come to their own interpretation. In other words, Turtle never struck me as the type who liked his information spoon fed, but this is just my response to your post, not his.

 

Stick to what you know because nothing you have to say about anything in the spiritual realm could ever have any credibility.

Actually, the debater who can speak to the opponents position better than they are ideally credible when debunking the opponents stance. You don't try to debunk relativity without knowing a little something about it first.

 

That's science. Understand what they are saying, and poke holes in it until you arrive at something better. Always amendable...

 

 

For the rest of your post, please refrain from preaching or quoting scriptures as support of claims, or you will not be welcome in this community much longer.

[Turtle]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Turtle

 

I tell you the Bible is crap, the Vedas are crap, the Quran is crap, LaoTzu's I Ching is crap, the Book of Morman is crap, the Urantia Book is crap, and any & all written works claiming some invisible oober powerful creature dictated it, is...well, crap.

 

:cheer:

 

really turtle what is your point? I fail to understand why you even read anything spiritual. Why waste your time? Stick to what you know because nothing you have to say about anything in the spiritual realm could ever have any credibility.

 

And a fine good morning to you Majeston. :cup: Ditto InfiniteNow, as he reads & knows me pretty darn well judging from his reply above. :) Namaste.

 

Now to the grit. Everything I read -spiritual or not -, I read to find out what people think. On that note, quoting Winston quoting Epictetus, "what concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are."

 

I heard people thought the Urantia book was a divine revelation full of truth, so I bothered to read it in order to make my own assessment. If there was truth in it and I didn't read it I would miss some truth, and if I didn't read it and it was crap then I would have no basis to challenge it.

 

Of course this is not far removed from your action in regard to me Majestron. It was no small effort I imagine to go reading my posts in other threads to find my words you started with, so why did you bother? Why because if you hadn't, you would have no basis for saying my words have no credibility.

 

So it goes. Now back to Urantia and a statement made there that is contrary to scientific understanding, to whit, that the most abundant element in the Universe is calcium. I don't recall the passage number, but if you have read the book you know it is there. Now the last I heard, scientific investigation indicates that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, so I must conclude Urantia is wrong by a preponderance of the evidence.

 

Well learnt galimatias is still galimatias. - Beatrix Terranna Goodwon

[Majeston]

You certainly have to do a lot better than that Turtle and I certainly hope you don't put too much money on the science du jour. From my recollection it changes nearly on a daily basis and considering the fact that we barely know what our own planet is made of and have barely scratched the surface of our own miniscule solar system let alone the the so-called "universe" or universe of universes, a wise man just might keep his "conclusions" in check for the time being.

I also seem to recall that the 2097 pages devote perhaps 2 or 3 chapters to the science of the day and the other 2000 is of a spiritual nature incomparable to any other work on the planet Earth.

This of course should not negate what it does reveal in the scientific regard and I am quite intimately aware of much discussion in that arena and also all of the current disagreements with pop science. I'm quite sure you have seen various scientific so-called hard fact as well as theory change in the short amount of time that you have been monitoring it. It certainly has in the time I have watched it.

It has been quite some time since I left the science behind in search of the much more real soul satisfying spiritual realities. of course your mileage may vary and apparently does.

[Turtle]

You certainly have to do a lot better than that Turtle

As will you.

It has been quite some time since I left the science behind in search of the much more real soul satisfying spiritual realities. of course your mileage may vary and apparently does.

 

 

Pray tell then, why have you come to a science forum? :)

[Turtle]

Well nows... I have added a poll to the thread and invite everyone to vote. I made it anonymous, and you may only pick one option.

 

I just re-read the entire thread; boy can I tend to some hyperbole, or what‽ :hyper: :) :rant:

Here's to Urantia and the bat people. :bat: Be sure to get out and Vote.

[Racoon]

I just voted..

 

Unlike Turtle I had no patience for the 1,400 or so pages of gobblety-gook that is the Urantia..

It read somewhat like the bible and somewhat like a bad sci-fi novel; of what I did manage to read before becoming nauseous with a whole new set of made up names..

The book was written when they didn't know jack about plate techtonics..

 

Its a waste of time and money.

:)

[Majeston]

I just voted..

 

Unlike Turtle I had no patience .............

The book was written when they didn't know jack about plate techtonics..

 

:

 

My My,,,,,

you certainly are tenacious and a deep thinker besides

LOL

 

So let me see, you say it was written when they didn't know Jack about Plate Techtonics

 

Actually Alfred Wegener had a flimsy not too well thought out theory about continental drift in 1912 IIRC. Nobody believed him or his so-called trash.

quote:

"Utter, damned rot!" said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society.

 

"If we are to believe [this] hypothesis, we must forget everything we have learned in the last 70 years and start all over again," said another American scientist. "

 

 

But, an entire foundation of the Urantia papers involve plate techtonics and it explains it in depth and much clearer than Wergener did and in fact it is the accepted theory today as fact, because it is.

 

So, where are you coming from??????????

 

 

:)

 

This is one of the big problems with America, they let anyone vote about anything, even if they don't know what they are talking about.

 

LOL

[Majeston]

 

 

 

Pray tell then, why have you come to a science forum? :)

 

 

Actually I didn't, I came to a discussion about the UB.

I googled it to see what was new in discussion forums and found it, so

I had a look see and Lo and behold I found that the apes were taking

over the planet again.

It's really quite amazing.

lol

[ughaibu]

Majeston: On another thread you used an analogy about a map being helpful if lost in the desert, I take this to suggest that the Bible, Koran, Urantia, etc are spiritual "maps", I can understand how the analogy would fit the Egyptian Book of the Dead but not to the above mentioned three, could you elaborate on this analogy please.

[Racoon]

My My,,,,,

you certainly are tenacious and a deep thinker besides

LOL

 

So let me see, you say it was written when they didn't know Jack about Plate Techtonics

 

Actually Alfred Wegener had a flimsy not too well thought out theory about continental drift in 1912 IIRC. Nobody believed him or his so-called trash.

quote:

"Utter, damned rot!" said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society.

 

"If we are to believe [this] hypothesis, we must forget everything we have learned in the last 70 years and start all over again," said another American scientist. "

 

 

But, an entire foundation of the Urantia papers involve plate techtonics and it explains it in depth and much clearer than Wergener did and in fact it is the accepted theory today as fact, because it is.

 

So, where are you coming from??????????

 

 

:)

 

This is one of the big problems with America, they let anyone vote about anything, even if they don't know what they are talking about.

 

LOL

 

As I stated: I gave up after a few chapters..

I felt from the get go that it was all BullS***

 

If I am wrong, then perhaps you can direct us to the pages of importance??

It is a huge, thick book...

 

I tend to notice that people who believe in the Urantia are crazy. But thats my subjective opinion.

 

[Majeston]

As I stated: I gave up after a few chapters..

I felt from the get go that it was all BullS***

 

,,,,,,,,,,,...........

I tend to notice that people who believe in the Urantia are crazy. But thats my subjective opinion.

 

:(

 

Really????????? I know at least a thousand, a handful of them are crazy, how many do you know?

 

 

 

*In 1970, Mo Siegel co- founded Celestial Seasonings Tea Company with only $500 of capital.* Mo and his friends harvested the first two years of tea production by combing the mountains of Colorado in search of exotic herb teas growing wild.* He led the company to a successful acquisition by Kraft, Inc., in 1984 and left the company *in 1986. Two years later, he returned to the Celestial Seasonings Board of Directors when the company became independent by buying itself back from Kraft.* In 1991, Mo once again became chairman and CEO and then took the company public. In 2000, he oversaw the merger of Celestial with The Hain Food Group to become the Hain Celestial Group.* For two years Mo stayed to oversee the transition between the companies. Mo retired in September 2002 to begin a new era in his life.* Today he serves on numerous corporate boards of directors, actively invests, travels, climbs the “fourteeners,” the 55 Colorado peaks that exceed 14,000 feet in height, and loves being a dad and grandpa.*

*

I am a Colorado country boy, chiseled out of the snow and rock of these mountains.* The year I was born, my father, who was raised in Chicago, moved our family to a dairy ranch on the side of a 9,000-foot-mountain pass in Colorado.* The stormy weather at the ranch proved too harsh for the cattle, so that spring my father moved to us to Palmer Lake, a little mountain town at an elevation of just over 7000 feet—still high by most standards—where I spent my childhood.***

*When I was two years old, my mother was killed by a drunk driver, leaving my traumatized father to raise three young children alone.*Although my father, a self-styled Jewish John Wayne, was deeply religious, he had always led an unconventional spiritual life.*He’d married my mother, although she was a Protestant, and felt closest to God while riding horses in the mountains; he prayed by the rivers and spent little time in formal religious environments.* At home his religious word stood supreme, at least in his presence.*But like my dad and his father before him, I grew up curious about religion, unconventional in my ideas, and in quest of deeper spiritual meaning.* As a consequence—and to the terrible annoyance of my dad—I asked a lot of questions about God and religion. During my formative years I was especially troubled by the apparent conflict between science and religion over the subject of evolution.

I spent my last two years of high school living at a Catholic monastery and attending their college prep school.* I entered the monastery school as a confused agnostic and graduated as a searching Christian.* At the monastery, one of the priests introduced me to the teachings of the brilliant Catholic theologian, Teilhard de Chardin.* Chardin’s elegant writing on the relationship between religion and science propelled me to read a broad array of books on evolution.* Before long, Charles Darwin became one of my life heroes, and his theories laid the foundation for my thinking on the subject.* While searching bookstores for books on evolution, I also scoured the religion sections.* I spent a number of years reading a wide range of religious books at an almost frenetic pace, ranging from Norman Vincent Peale to Taoism.* The more I read on religion and science, the more I was convinced that science reflected the divine nature of God, rather than contradicting it. I wanted to understand how the world was the way it was. The idea that the universe was created in six days, or even 6,000 years, was something that wasn’t working for me. I was rapidly moving toward centrist Christianity with a complete endorsement of scientific fact.

It was in 1969 at age 19 that I first encountered The Urantia Book. A number of friends had praised its teachings on evolution, and that Christmas a girlfriend gave it to me. I was surprised at its daunting size: 2,097 pages long. *What confounded me the most was that the book contained 875 pages on the life and teachings of Jesus, including the missing years of his life—from age one to twelve and then from age thirteen to approximately thirty—not chronicled in the Bible.* How strange and intriguing, I thought. Dinosaurs and Jesus all in one text.* I didn’t read it right away; instead, I lent it to a friend. But over the course of the next few months, people kept telling me about The Urantia Book. So late one night, after hearing, “You really have to read this book,” for what seemed like the hundredth time, I knocked on my friend’s door and told him, “I need my book back.” For the next year, I was absorbed in reading it—and I’ve been reading it ever since. Even today, I still host a weekly Urantia Book study group at my home.

Initially, I found the Foreword to The Urantia Book utterly confusing, but I kept reading anyway. What followed was a fascinating intellectual and spiritual adventure that shook up everything I thought I knew. The first two parts of the book describe God, the Trinity, the organization and structure of the universe, life on other worlds, life after death, angels and other personalities, and Heaven.*When I read Part Three, I felt as though I’d won the lottery.*This section deals with the origin and history of our world, starting from the origin of our sun over six billion years ago—when it spun out of the disintegrating Andronover Nebula—and ending with the birth of Jesus.* From ice ages to saber tooth tigers; from the first human family to the evolution of modern government; from the story of Adam and Eve to the birth of prayer--The Urantia Book presented a logical story of physical and social evolution. It was the bridge between science and religion that I had been searching for, and I was finally at peace with the subject that had consumed me for years. *

The fourth section of the book recounts the magnificent life and teachings of Jesus. Before I read The Urantia Book, I loved the story of Jesus in the New Testament, but I had always felt disappointed that it only covered a few years of his life. I wanted to know his entire life story and have it fit into a bigger context.*Being born to a Christian mother, raised by a non-conformist Jewish father, and having spent two years in a Catholic monastery, my smorgasbord of religious education had taught me to question everything. How did the idea that Jesus was the only son of God relate to Moses, Buddha and other prophets? And if you were born in India and had never heard of Jesus, would you really go to “hell?”* When I read the section in The Urantia Book about Jesus, I was profoundly moved: Jesus—both the human being and the Son of God—came alive in the most superbly written biographical literature that I have ever come across. In addition to reframing Jesus for me, it made me far more respectful and appreciative of my childhood training in both Judaism and Christianity.*

Simply put, Part Four transformed my life from one of doubt to one of faith, from one of insecurity to one of trust in God—with Jesus as the lens in which God becomes visible. As a spiritual adventurer, I was thrilled that the Jesus of The Urantia Book built upon the Bible, and then took me a hundred miles further.

The Urantia Book changed three major things inside me. First, it made me examine my values and commit myself to doing something worthwhile with my life. After college, studying and peace marches were replaced by the ordinary tasks of living: making money and raising a family. After studying the teachings in The Urantia Book, I knew that it would feel selfish and wasteful to simply focus on material success. So, as a young man, when I began thinking of what I could do to make a living, I immediately turned to the health food industry. I was adamant that whatever product or service I sold should be healthy and make a positive difference in people’s quality of life.

Growing up in Colorado, I had developed a love for hiking and spending time in the mountains. Not long after I read The Urantia Book, I decided to start collecting the herbs that grew wild in the canyons and valleys of the mountains around Boulder. With the help of friends, I collected and dried 500 pounds of my first blend, called Mo's 36 Herb Tea®. It was packaged in hand-sewn muslin bags and sold to a local health food store. This was the start of Celestial Seasonings Teas, which today is the largest manufacturer and marketer of specialty teas in the North America.

Like all business people, I have had to make choices every step of the way. *My materialistic side could easily have hardened me, forming me into one tough businessman.*But the ideals I internalized from The Urantia Book kept pushing me to choose good over greed and to care about the people I worked with as well as the people who bought our products. In fact, those ideas were the inspiration for the uplifting quotes we print on the side of our tea boxes and on our teabag tags!

The second thing the book for me did was instill the importance of family. One line in the book reads, “The family is man's greatest purely human achievement.” Everything I have done since reading The Urantia Book—from my career to my mountain-climbing—has been influenced by my decision to put my family first. I vividly remember the moment when I first understood the choices this commitment required. It was December 24th. I was 26 years old and was sitting in the beautifully appointed office of the first billionaire I’d ever met. It was an important meeting: the billionaire and another executive in the company—also extremely wealthy—were talking to me about investing in Celestial Seasonings. Although the offices were emptying as employees departed to celebrate Christmas Eve, these two men just wanted to talk to me. It was snowing like crazy and I realized I might get stranded at the airport if I stayed much longer. I thought, “I’m going to miss Christmas with my wife and three young children…chasing after money!”

After a while, when the building was empty except for us, I asked one of the men where he was spending Christmas and what he was doing that night. He broke down and told me of his many divorces and how his children hated him. It turned out that he had nowhere to go. The billionaire also had been through multiple divorces and had no one waiting for him at home. They were hanging around their luxurious offices, entertaining a 26-year-old kid—because they didn’t have anywhere better to go. The combination of the snowstorm, the two lonely men in that super-rich office and the quote in The Urantia Book about human achievement and family hit me hard. I asked myself, What’s important in life?**

The answer was obvious. I stood up and said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to catch a plane.” I left them, those two sad older men, and went home to spend the holiday with my wife and kids.

The third and most valuable thing that The Urantia Book did for me was to make God real. I once saw a sign on the inside of a friend’s front door that said, “God is knocking on the door; let’s see whose face he’s wearing this time.” I loved that idea, but it wasn’t yet my experience. Finding God on an everyday basis—and in everyone I met—seemed an almost impossible task for me. *After reading and absorbing The Urantia Book’s specific and detailed teachings about the real fragment of God that dwells within all of us, I slowly grew to trust that a very real part of God has been implanted in our minds to guide our decisions toward God. This part of God—the still small voice of Christianity and Judaism, the Atman of Hinduism and the Tao of Taoism—lives with us in our joys and our sufferings.* Experiencing God as something real and tangible inside of me and inside of you, and not just some kind of wispy spirit, was pivotal for me.*This reality has shaped every single day of my life since that time.

When I first heard people discussing The Urantia Book, they said it was a revelation, written not by human beings, but by angels, which I thought was just the goofiest thing I’d ever heard. I ended up reading it in spite of all that. After I read it, I was not concerned about who had written it or how it had been written because it was so powerful. I’d wanted bold; I found bold.* I’d wanted spiritual adventure and I was on the ride of my life.* I’d wanted truth and the book was loaded with it.*Since that time, I have looked into it deeply and I cannot find any author associated with the book. But that is not the point, because I love what it says and I’m a much better person because of its teachings. I’ve learned not to pick fights with the books I read—I’m appreciative and I grow from them.

*

*

*

Mo Siegel

Capitol Peaks

Boulder, Co.

In Quest of Life's Summits

[Eclogite]

The fact that a successful individual can find inspiration and interest in any book is more a reflection of the strengths of that individual than of the strenghts of the book.

[Turtle]

... When I first heard people discussing The Urantia Book, they said it was a revelation, written not by human beings, but by angels, which I thought was just the goofiest thing I’d ever heard. I ended up reading it in spite of all that. After I read it, I was not concerned about who had written it or how it had been written because it was so powerful. I’d wanted bold; I found bold.* I’d wanted spiritual adventure and I was on the ride of my life.* I’d wanted truth and the book was loaded with it.*Since that time, I have looked into it deeply and I cannot find any author associated with the book. But that is not the point, because I love what it says and I’m a much better person because of its teachings. I’ve learned not to pick fights with the books I read—I’m appreciative and I grow from them.

*

*

*

Mo Siegel

Capitol Peaks

Boulder, Co.

In Quest of Life's Summits

 

Not a bad testimonial there Mo, and I think I detect a bit of humor in you as well. Namaste. Drawing from your words in the Quran thread as you did for me, you said

Of course you can believe whatever you wish and insert any qualifiers into your own ramblings which you would like to.

You can flash your badge and put lots of initials after your name.

Truth on the other hand needs no such sophistry.

 

You employed the badge-flashing style quite well in the testimonial, as well as a few good strums on the ol' heart-strings. :hihi:

 

So, on to who wrote this (even if badly), and the book Saitia recommended back in post #46.

A History of the Urantia Papers

By Larry Mullins with Dr. Meredith Sprunger

Published 2000 by Penumbra Press

 

He puts the writing as early as 1906, wheras the book itself mentions only the date 1934. Probably not an unreasonable interval to allow for editing such an ambitious project.

 

Once again, here is the online version: The Urantia Papers

 

Yeah Urantia and the bat people. :bat: :cup: