© 1998 David A. Kantor
© 1998 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
The Internet provides a platform for missionary activities and the development of social networks of believers unique to the timing of the Fifth Epochal Revelation. The Fellowship is quietly establishing an architecture for revelation-propagation suitable for the immediate future of the accelerating global information revolution. This infrastructure will coexist with and exploit the missionary potentials of multiple emerging communications technologies. International usage of the Fellowship’s technology infrastructure approached 12,000 individual users in September. Including those who returned multiple times the total exceeded 16,000 visits for the month. Usage is currently expanding at a monthly rate of 20%. The ultimate success of this experiment in revelation dissemination will be dependent upon the quality and quantity of reader participation.
In the great library at Alexandria the Greeks attempted to collect copies of all the written works in the world. Scholars made perilous journeys by land and sea at great cost to gain access to this store of human knowledge and wisdom. When this library burned to the ground some 1500 years ago during the decline of Hellenistic culture, it contained an estimated 600,000 scrolls, or roughly 50,000 average books in today’s terms. Adding written works known to exist at the time from China, India, Iraq and Iran, a reasonable estimate may be made that in Jesus’ day the sum total of written information was contained in approximately 100,000 books. In digital terms, this translates into 100 Gigabytes of computer storage space for the representation of all human knowledge as it existed in the first century.
In our present day, medium range personal computers come with 4.5 Gigabyte hard drives as standard equipment. New technology currently being deployed in the corporate and business world equips common office networks with the ability to transmit data at a rate of one Gigabyte per second! The scrolls in the Alexandria library were hand-written on sheets of papyrus, laboriously manufactured by human labor. Hand-made inks and quill pens completed the technology infrastructure. Today, automated machines are rapidly encoding all of human knowledge into electronic symbols and storing it on the oxidized surfaces of crystal lattices.
In the days of Melchizedek and Jesus, news of epochal revelations was carried by word of mouth over perilous sea routes and dusty caravan trails to destinations throughout the known world. Today, news of another epochal revelation is being electronically converted into microscopic waveforms, superimposed upon laser-driven light beams, and sent on its journey to the remote corners of the planet through strands of glass made from sand.
Within this rapidly metamorphosing milieu, the Fellowship has been quietly experimenting and developing a web presence designed to present The Urantia Book to truth seekers from around the world. At present rates of access to the Fellowship website, the number of people downloading documents over the course of six weeks exceeds the total attendance at all the conferences and study sessions held since 1955. And these individuals hail from more than eighty countries on our planet. The site is currently maintained by a group of more than 30 readers from multiple language groups and national backgrounds, linked together by a deep commitment to the propagation of the revelation and an international network of scanners, workstations, computers and servers (and E-mail!) stretching from North America to Germany, Spain, Australia, Chile, Colombia and Canada.
The list below contains website statistics for the month of September, 1998. Shown are the number of visitors from specific internet domains. These “domains” are roughly synonymous with specific countries and provide some insight into the level of international activity. This shows a little over 16,500 visitors for September. We know that the number of unique visitors — those visiting only once during the month-was a little over 11,800 . This means that some 30% visited more than once. All combined, these visitors downloaded more than 61,500 documents during the month.
Number of website visitors and their domains of origin, month of September 1998
Countries and Visitors: Commercial USA — 8129; Unknown origins — 3485; USA educational institutions — 530; Mexico — 509; Spain — 372; US government agencies — 381; Colombia — 254; Argentina — 229; Canada — 217; Brazil133; Australia — 131; Finland — 122; Chile — 107; Non-profit organizations — 102; Sweden — 94; Peru — 91; Greece — 90; Norway — 80; United Kingdom — 77; Italy — 73; US Military — 65; Netherlands — 58; New Zealand — 54; Costa Rica — 53; Venezuela — 50; Estonia — 49; Uruguay — 47; Singapore — 43; Germany — 33; Nicaragua — 33; Ecuador — 29; Austria — 27; Belgium — 27; France — 25; Thailand — 23; Malaysia — 21; Philippines — 21; South Africa — 21; Portugal — 20; Japan 19; Israel — 18; South Korea — 16; Bolivia — 14; El Salvador — 14; Zambia -14; Denmark — 12; Ireland — 12; India — 10; Dominican Republic — 10; Switzerland — 10; Honduras — 9; Puerto Rico — 8; Russian Federation — 8; Slovenia — 8; Poland — 7; Turkey — 7; Egypt — 6; Paraguay — 6; Hong Kong — 5; Latvia — 5; Lithuania — 5; Czech Republic — 4; Hungary — 4; Indonesia — 4; Romania — 4; United Arab Emirates — 3; Cook Islands — 3; Guatemala — 3; Ukraine — 3; Georgia — 2; Iceland — 2; Luxembourg — 2; Malta — 2; Oman — 2; Trinidad and Tobago — 2; Taiwan — 2; Yugoslavia — 2; Bermuda — 1; China — 1; Panama — 1.
A list of all the documents for which more than 100 requests were received during the month of September, 1998: Fellowship Home Page — 2593; Fellowship Site Index — 1403; Spanish Home Page — 1117; Index and search engine for El libro de Urantia — 938; Index to the text of The Urantia Book — 872; What’s New page — 609; Introduction to Taoism for readers of The Urantia Book — 594; What is The Urantia Book? — 591; About the Fellowship — 473; Overview of the text of The Urantia Book — 428; Introduction to Confucianism for readers of The Urantia Book — 425; Index to Spanish Discourses of Jesus — 397; Current Events — 309; Introduction to Shinto for readers of The Urantia Book — 255; El libro de Urantia paper 88 — 250; Introduction to Buddhism for Readers of The Urantia Book — 239; Index of articles about The Urantia Book — 215; Introduction to Hinduism for readers of The Urantia Book — 212; Introduction to Zoroastrianism for readers of The Urantia Book — 207; Access to International and Domestic Study Group Database — 202; Spanish introduction to El libro de Urantia — 198; Foreword to El libro de Urantia — 181; Index to Cal Feldman’s Illustrated Urantia Book- 180; Index to Jesus materials — 177; Search engine for The Urantia Book — 176; Introduction to Islam for readers of The Urantia Book — 167; El libro de Urantia paper 87 — 163; Introduction to Sikhism for readers of The Urantia Book — 158; El libro de Urantia paper 62 — 156; Index to multi-lingual resources — 154; Links to reader’s websites — 151; Introduction to Jainism for readers of The Urantia Book — 144; El libro de Urantia paper 53 — 141; English transcript of Bill Sadler’s origins tape — 141; Index to articles on science and The Urantia Book — 137; El libro de Urantia paper 90 — 135; Introduction to Christianity for readers of The Urantia Book — 132; El libro de Urantia paper 5 — 128; El libro de Urantia paper 84 — 127; Spanish article by Nina Bravo on the family — 127; Index to historic documents and photos — 126; Comparison of the Bible to The Urantia Book — 124; El libro de Urantia paper 57 — 124; El libro de Urantia paper 1 — 123; The Urantia Book paper 1 section 2 — 123; El libro de Urantia paper 132 section 2 — 116; A study of the books of the Apocrypha for readers of The Urantia Book — 115; Introduction to Judaism for readers of The Urantia Book — 114; El libro de Urantia paper 82 — 113; El libro de Urantia paper 140 section 3 — 111; El libro de Urantia paper 69 — 104; El libro de Urantia paper 2 — 103; El libro de Urantia paper 12 — 103; El libro de Urantia paper 65 — 102; El libro de Urantia paper 15 — 100.
Why, you might ask, are the introductions to the world’s religions so popular? It is because people are searching the web for information about these religions. By providing these materials, we create an introduction to The Urantia Book within a context created by the user’s own search for knowledge. We could do much more. If we had good quality articles which related concepts from The Urantia Book to such topics as AIDS, genetic engineering, the end of the millennium, international economics and other topics of current popular interest, we would be able to introduce many more people to the book. If anyone reading this article is interested in creating such materials, please contact us — the opportunities for spreading awareness of the book are almost unlimited and can be done within the range of your own specialized knowledge and interests.
The following list shows growth in website services over the year from September 1997 through September 1998. Not only is usage growing, but the rate of usage is growing as well, up from 7% per month a year ago, to 20% per month today. Bear in mind that these statistics are from the California server only and include usage figures from neither the secondary server located in New Jersey nor the Spanish language server located in Santiago de Chile.
Number of visitors per month: Sep. 1997 — 3,596; Oct. 1997 — 3,848; Nov. 1997 — 4,098; Dec. 1997 — 4,352; Jan. 1998 — 4,661; Feb. 1998 — 4,997; Mar. 1998 — 5,396; Apr. 1998 — 5,828; May 1998 — 6,382; Jun. 1998 — 7,048; Jul. 1998 — 7,837; Aug. 1998 — 9,462; Sep. 1998 — 11,838.
If we had good quality articles which related concepts from The Urantia Book to such topics as AIDS, genetic engineering, the end of the millennium, international economics and other topics of current popular interest, we would be able to introduce many more people to the book. If anyone reading this article is interested in creating such materials, please contact us-the opportunities for spreading awareness of the book are almost unlimited and can be done within the range of your own specialized knowledge and interests.
These are remarkable numbers and they parallel the general statistics on growing Internet usage in the world as a whole. Currently, access to the Internet is growing faster in the third world than access to clean drinking water and sanitary sewage systems. This revolution has been compared by many writers to some of the most critical junctures in human social evolution, such as the spread of agriculture, the dawn of the iron age or the development of the printing press. While we have lived with “mass communications” for the past half-century, what’s different about the Internet is that it superdemocratizes communication. The publication of information is being taken out of the hands of the gatekeepers (publishers, telecommunications companies, commercial broadcasting corporations, etc.) and placed into the hands of the five billion inhabitants of the planet. Current estimates are that by the turn of the century more than one billion of these folks will have Internet access. All of this adds up to an unprecedented set of potentials for the propagation of the revelation. The Internet makes it possible for anyone with a computer to actively participate in a major missionary effort.
The current state of Urantia materials deployed on the web is a partial actualization of a vision nurtured by a small group of readers for nearly fifteen years. In 1985, Richard Preiss and Dave Missavage developed a service called B3-The Brotherhood of Man Bulletin Board. This service was based on a Commodore SX-64 which readers could dial into via a long distance phone call (one at a time, please!) through a 300 baud modem. The bulletin board contained a collection of conference talks, study aids, and journal articles which could be downloaded.
B3 was later turned over to George Samos and Tim Young who further developed it as a resource library in the late eighties. It ran in the closet of an apartment. In 1992, Michael Million started the original Urantial E-mail list on a server running out of the University of Arkansas where he worked. As the Internet took off in the mid 1990’s, people like Mark Turrin and Lamar Zabielski took the lead with the first significant reader website and the use of IRC chat.
Today there are more than fifty independent readermaintained websites containing information about The Urantia Book and the readership, ranging from study aids and artwork to stinging critiques of movement political foibles. In the San Francisco bay area Michelle Klimesh now publishes a weekly electronic newsletter to Society members and study groups, knitting together reader groups scattered across all of northern California.
Additional services currently being developed include: (1) Downloadable audio archives — a new collection of Bill Sadler tapes, recordings of conference talks, regional lectures by students of The Urantia Book and more. (2) Enhanced tools for accessing, cross referencing and manipulating the text of The Urantia Book in multiple languages. (3) Tools and resources for study group leaders. (4) More translated secondary works. (5) Improved indexing and search tools. (6) Deployment of distance learning software and offering of on-line studies. (7) Development of a network providing additional data communication services, shared document publication and an internal Internet-based telephone network for administrative and committee work.
The Fellowship Internet presence may be viewed as a set of tools available to the readership for the further actualization of outreach potentials. There are opportunities ranging from the development of computer programs to the creation of study aids, transcribing of old audio and video tapes, proofreading of published documents, creation of electronic artwork, development of learning games, responding to E-mail inquiries, assisting translators, developing resources for children, designing and teaching on-line classes, creating web-based study aids, and much more.
Ultimately, the effectiveness of this unique dissemination opportunity depends entirely upon the quality of the work done by contributing readers. If you think your service time, interests, and efforts might be multiplied through integration with Fellowship Internet resources and partnership with other active Urantians, please contact us at ubinfo@ubfellowship.org.
David A. Kantor is a designer of computer software used for managing corporate voice and data communication networks. He has been a student of The Urantia Book for more than thirty years and is the manager of the Fellowship Website.