© 2011 Jean Royer
© 2011 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
I have been browsing a number of blogs and other forums on the Internet dealing with The Urantia Book. It is remarkable how few people understand what they read. Most simply take in what they want (or can) to see. I then remembered that Jesus’ apostles did not understand half of what he was saying, but it is true that when he spoke to them, he was actually speaking to an entire universe. And I thought: if these close beings did not understand him, what about the simple disciples? It seems that this did not trouble Jesus unduly and that he thought that faith was enough.
To return to the readers of our time, there are several categories, the hostile and the friendly, the hostile are subdivided into skeptics and fundamentalists, the latter coming from Christian circles for whom history ended with the New Testament; but we will have to reckon with other fundamentalists in times to come. As for the skeptics, they call themselves either atheists or scientists and they are most often content to repeat that the science of the Urantia Book is outdated, without seeing that their own notion of science is even more so. We find, for example, almost everywhere, that the book says that man has 48 chromosomes when we have known since 1956 that he has 46. However, if the word chromosome is known to the revelators, we find it only once, and, for man, the expression linked to 48 is not chromosomes but ‘trait determiners’, which is correct for sex cells because of the presence of the X and Y chromosomes, although no cell normally has this number. See Halvorson’s study in UbtheNews, unfortunately only in English.
But there are also convinced readers who have skimmed over this or that passage and disregard all the others. Now, we are told that “partial knowledge is potentially bad” while also affirming that “no revelation can be complete before reaching the Eternal Father”
Thus, on an American forum, a reader suggests locating the architectural worlds in the universe, but he did not read (or did not understand!) what was said about the distances or the number of stars in the system or that Andromeda was uninhabited, so he places Salvington in the Andromeda cloud more than two million light years away and Jerusem near the star Alnitak in Orion. However, this star is more than 800 light years from us while the diameter of Satania is less than 100 light years. You do not have to take my word for it, but you can consult the study by Frederick L. Beckner Stars, galaxies superuniverses and the Urantia Book in a bilingual version by Claude Flibotte at: www.urantia-quebec.ca/activites/urantiaqc 179.pdf
Others, enthusiastic, do not hesitate to make their own cuisine with the ingredients taken from the book, like this lady who made a summary of the four parts of the book in Portuguese and who mixes the Thought Adjusters with the Mystery Monitors to make Thought Monitors (Monitor do Pensamento instead of Ajustador do Pensamento or Monitor Misterioso).
It seems to me that there are enough difficulties in the complexity* of this book that it is useless to add our own incompetence to it.
* Complex does not mean complicated but should also avoid confusion with simple.
The Urantia Book is neither a simple book nor a complicated book, but it is a complex book.
Jean Royer