Criticism of the Urantia Book
While I'm open to the possibility of messages channelled from beyond, and I
do recognize the existence of such, particularly the Seth material
(I only find them disappointing by their limitations, as they originate from ghosts
with limited knowledge and prone to errors and imperfections, while I'm sure a
really omniscient being would know much more valuable things to dictate in the same
numbers of pages), I'm confident that the Urantia book is no truth, most likely a pure
human fake. The idea it could be partly channelled by insane ghosts may not be
totally excluded, but...
I did not need to analyze things in much details. Just a short look sufficed to show it not worth
checking further. Here are some reasons for this.
Good reasons to dismiss it as a fake are already given in the wikipedia
article, so just read there, I won't repeat them here.
Some observations I'd add.
From wikipedia: the book "teaches that neither science nor logic will ever be able
to prove or disprove the existence of God" (I
disagree), to be compared with the quote from the book
I saw in the criticism section "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".
So well, they proudly declare as a revealed truth that reason cannot prove the existence of
God in general, nor the truth of their "revelation" in particular, a state of affair that God would
do everything to maintain, by His decision to... shut the hell up, very precisely forbidding
Himself from providing any truth in this book which could then serve as rational confirmation
of the validity (divine or at least spiritually inspired origin) of that book. For this He had to
undertake actively polluting his "revelation" by a mess of errors from the science of that time
which the unfortunate readers of that revelation would thus have to keep enduring...
Oh yeah, what a joke.
Also from that wikipedia article:
"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.". I thought that our Universe, containing many groups of
galaxies, therefore had to be much bigger than one of them... as for spiritual hierarchies,
why would they be contained in any kind of physical space with size measurable by the
physical measures of distances of our universe ???
It is mentioned to endorse, among the miracles of Jesus, "the feeding of the five thousand".
But this precise Gospel story is clearly unreal as I explained there.
"the eighth chemically active element resembles the first, the ninth the second, and so on.
Such a fact of the physical world unmistakably points to the sevenfold constitution of ancestral energy". No it doesn't. It is perfectly explained by quantum physics.Renaming the Earth
Why ? "Earth" is the name we give it in English, while it is called "Terre" in French, and whatever else
in other languages. Names are given as a choice of a sequence of phonemes picked from those which
we humans can utter. Other creatures from other physical or non-physical societies
would have different lists of basic phonemes or other stuff
from which to form names. Any idea that some different sequence of our phonemes would be
a better match for some "true name" of our planet, is just a ridiculous extravagance of vocabulary
for nothing. And so many more new names there... if we applied any permutation to these names,
would it make any difference to the truth of the story or not ?
Looking at truthbook.com
And trying to find there something that makes sense, worth reply to. Not so easy to find,
as often in religious texts and other bullshit, roughly just wasteful filling of pages for nothing.
God exists ? God loves us ? There is life after death ? Well ok, that isn't big news as so
many other doctrines say that much. Details of the life of Jesus ?
Why care ? We cannot verify it anyway, so it doesn't make any difference.
From the page "The Evolution of Local Universes": "a Paradise Creator Son appears
upon the scene, accompanied by a Creative Daughter of the Infinite Spirit".
Uh ? I thought that the distinction of genders was a mere contingency of the biology
of our planet. Why would it make such a more general sense ?
Surprising
concepts involved for a spiritual cosmology: "administrative organization", "headquarters"... that
looks so human, at the image of how things go in our world.
In desperate seach of some effective info, the more likely page may be "Science vs Religion". Still hardly anything effective there. I only find this:
"The entire science of mathematics, the whole domain of philosophy, the highest physics or chemistry, could not predict or know that the union of two gaseous hydrogen atoms with one gaseous oxygen atom would result in a new and qualitatively superadditive substance—liquid water. The understanding knowledge of this one physiochemical phenomenon should have prevented the development of materialistic philosophy and mechanistic cosmology."
Bullshit, totally irrelevant line of reasoning. Indeed this fact of the properties of H2O, that it makes liquid water, was not deducible at the time when the Urantia book was written. Why ? Just because, like any facts of chemistry in general, the explanation (deduction from first principles) requires to start with quantum mechanics and calculate its consequences... which are mathematically necessary but require supercomputers for the deduction to be indeed correctly made. Just inform yourself on the calculation of the mass of the proton: it only has 3 elementary particles (quarks), related by the strong nuclear force, and still it requires "massive supercomputers" to be processed down to a few % accuracy. Why be surprised that, at the time of that "revelation" when they had no computers, the understanding that systems of hundreds of H2O molecules behave as a liquid seemed obscure and inaccessible ?
Numerological aspects
Strange coincidences with our conventional decimal system: any given precise number
that looks better when spelled in decimal convention than in any other base, is clearly
an emergence from the culture of this world, with too small chances of describing
more general truths. Examples : -
"An electron being composed of 100 ultimatons"
- "an eternal universe containing a billion perfect worlds"
- "our local universe of 10 million inhabitable planets" while "each local universe contains at least 100 million stars"
- "100,000 local universes being in each superuniverse"
Not worth my time
Continuing to look through a bit more... I really wonder why waste time reading such crap and replying to it. Just all totally ridiculous. Why care to point out the obvious of the ridicule ? No sane person can read that without rolling on the floor laughing at the idea anyone can take such stories as any more serious than the story of Grendizer.
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