© 1988 Don Lee
© 1988 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
I was fortunate to be in Cairo, Egypt two years ago. My first day there I was faced with having to spend the morning in the Cairo Museum when all I really wanted to do was see the Great Pyramids at Giza and the Sphinx which guarded them. But I was stuck for what was to be five hours in a cluttered, barely organized warehouse containing the pride of 3000 years of Ancient Egypt. “This is obnoxious”, I thought. Do I really want to spend my precious time in this dreary hall?" And yet, if one wants to learn anything at all about that captivating historic period, they simply must go there. What a remarkable window to the distant past! Go clockwise and one begins to get a sense of chronology; maybe someone didn’t just throw all this stuff in here. Over there is a remarkable display of artifacts and statuary from the time of those pyramid builders Zoser, Chephren, and Mykerinos. They were the big boys a very long time ago when lower Egypt ruled the Nile. Keep on going and one will detect the power base of Egypt shifting to the south (or to Upper Egypt as the flow of the Nile is reckoned). It was in this middle period that Egypt reached perhaps the greatest of her several golden ages; when the temples of Luxor and Karnak grew in size and significance and pharaohs were laid to rest in the Valley of the Kings.
In this room here — the remnants of the age of Thutmoses, who presided over an age of vast territorial expansion. This comer is devoted to Queen Hathepsut. How was she so clever to attain the hall of power? I was getting excited now. I thought, “Boy, I can’t wait to get past pharaohs Amenhotep 1 through 4 because then there’s Ramses, the great builder of monuments. After that it’s upstairs to see the complete Tutankhamun. I’ll bet there’s more gold there than in all of Fort Knox!”
Thank God for Mohammed, my guide, who tactfully ushered me into a relatively small room and began to explain what I was looking at, “This room is dedicated to Amenhotep IV”, he explained, “who temporarily changed the face of Egypt. He moved the capital city from Karnak to Tel El Amarna and proceeded to proclaim the Aton, the sun god, as the creator and sustainer of all. Notice the very liberalized art styles and how every time Amenhotep is depicted, it’s in worshipful praise towards the Aton. All the other pharaohs were somehow themselves blessed, or sanctioned, by deity.”
The man was a rebel, a delightful, humble rebel. I could not help but be attracted to him. His queen was the famous Nefertiti. Who wouldn’t want to be married to her?
As Einstein suggested, great men have always been besieged by Lilliputian minds. Mohammed went on to say that upon Amenhotep’s death conservative forces allied against him destroyed his city and most of what it contained, The capital returned to Karnak, the powerful priests rejected Aton for the more familiar Amun and his pantheon of animistic deity buddies.
“Oh, by the way, this man was so committed to the worship of Aton that he changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Ikhnaton.”
Ikhnaton! That’s the guy in The URANTIA Book! They talk about this religious giant of his age and I just saw the proof here in Room 27 !
Indeed. The URANTIA Book states that “never in all history did any king so methodically proceed to swing a whole nation from polytheism to monotheism as did this extraordinary Ikhnaton.” (UB 95:5.4) The Melchizedek author goes on to say that had he been more politically savvy, Ikhnaton may have founded a great monotheistic tradition in Egypt that possibly could have culminated in Michael’s seventh bestowal taking place there. Oh well.
There are two basic approaches to our understanding of The URANTIA Book which, for the purpose of making this essay work, I’ll call faith and fact.
Faith, I suppose, can originate as a sort of wishful thinking. “I think that might be true, at least I hope it is.” However, faith evolved is knowing. There is so much of the book that speaks to the heart, no less than to the spirit within. It’s as if the truth, borne by the celestial authors, meets that growing divinity of spirit within us. They fuse. We intuit, we somehow know that it’s true. Which of us has not been thrilled by a passage such as this: “There is in the mind of God a plan which embraces every creature of all his vast domains, and this plan is an eternal purpose of boundless-opportunity, unlimited progress and endless life. And the infinite treasures of such a matchless career are yours for the striving. The goal of eternity is ahead! The adventure of divinity attainment lies before you! The race for perfection is on! Whosoever will may enter, and certain victory will crown the efforts of every human being who will run the race of faith and trust…” (UB 32:5.8) Do we have proof of this? No. But many of us have faith-absorbed it and faith-grasped it.
On the other hand, The URANTIA Book is loaded with facts. We are, not to our discredit, creatures of time and space and we are mightily influenced by the logical, rational approach. “Prove it to me”, we say, “and if it meets these criteria, I’ll accept it as true.” That’s all right, Is not the universe predicated on the inevitable link between cause and effect?
Wouldn’t we love if on the six o’clock news Dan Rather said: “Scientists today discovered what they believe to be basic units of materialized energy more fundamental than even the atom or its components”? We’d revel, “Ah, they’ve found the -! Just like it says in The URANTIA Book.”
Wouldn’t we rejoice if the Voyager spacecraft, now pulling outwards toward Neptune and Pluto, radioed back irrefutable evidence of our solar system’s eleventh and twelfth planets? Our confidence in the book would be strengthened. Indeed, this process of verification of what we’ve already been told is an ongoing one and is quickening.
The restatement of the teachings of Jesus is made easier by the presence of the Biblical account. He was here a mere 2,000 years ago and we do have records that have survived. We, therefore, have a factual foundation upon which to build newer and grander interpretations.
For the story of Adam and Eve, now 40,000 years past, we have considerably less to go on. A garbled allegory in Genesis is all. We have virtually nothing concrete upon which to place the book’s elaborate story of celestial beings coming to earth, biological upliftment and a design for planetary education.
Who can say what our science and discovery will prove to be true in the decades to come? I know I’I1 never forget that moment in the wonderfully cluttered Cairo Museum when I learned that Ikhnaton was actually and indeed the great religious reformer The URANTIA Book says he was. There, the ongoing verification and correlation of human knowledge with divine revelation continued apace. I felt wonderful. I realized that the validation of fact is one building block towards construction of a greater faith.
In Ancient Egypt, long before Ikhnaton, there was another great teacher named Amenope. He was the actual author of the First Psalm of the Bible which Ikhnaton embraced. It reads in part:
“Blessed is the man…
whose delight is in the law of
the Lord.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season…”
Blessed is the remarkable Amenhotep IV, now thirty centuries gone, who, like a tree planted by streams of water, still yields his spiritual fruit for all seasons.
Don Lee, Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
From the inaugural edition of ‘ILUMINATIONS’ Spring 1987.