#van winkle's

“The first three parts of The Urantia Book describe a complicated universe with invisible seraphim and spirit and semi-spirit beings of all sorts; the last part tells the story of Jesus’ entire life in detail, all 36 years. Though it has just a few thousand followers, the book has been translated into 20 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian and Portuguese. There’s even a famous operatic cycle based on it, as well as at least four fantasy novels. The book also purports that there have been many, many sons of God like Jesus on many different planets, because there are a billion worlds. When evolution is complete, each of these worlds will have 100,000 local universes with 10 million inhabited planets. Our earth is called Urantia, and it's number 606 in a planetary group named Satania, the headquarters of which is called Jerusem. When we die, we’re reincarnated from planet-to-planet, then finally to Paradise, where the Deity lives. There is a little piece of the Deity in each of us, called a Thought Adjuster. The Fellowship will tell you that it’s not a cult, but in The Urantia Book, the revelator named the Brilliant Evening Star of Nebadon calls for Urantians to replace Christianity with a “new cult” that will be the “true religion” of the future. “The Urantia Book itself does not represent a destructive cult. But some of its self-proclaimed prophets lead groups that can be seen as destructive cults.”So how did this insightful book come to be? Well, there are many origin stories, but everyone seems to agree that it’s a “direct-voice” book, meaning that it wasn’t written by a human. Instead, aliens communicated the text directly to a person, or in the words of the Urantia Book Fellowship, “numerous supermortal personalities…made contact through the Thought Adjuster (indwelling spirit of God) of a particular human being on our world.” According to William Sadler, the leader of the movement, a “Divine Counselor” presented the ideas in a language called Uversa, which had to be translated into Salvington and then into Satania before it could be translated into English and communicated to a human being.  The most accepted story, found in How to Know What to Believe by Harold Sherman, quoted and summarized in Martin Gardner’s Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery, is that around 1911, a man in Sadler’s apartment building began having fits and spells at night. Eventually he started speaking in other voices and revealed that he was “a student visitor on an observation trip here from a far distant planet.” William Sadler and his wife, Dr. Lena Sadler, had conversations with these voices for almost 10 years while their adopted daughter, Christy, took notes. In the 1920s a group of friends (eventually called the Forum) put together a list of 4,000 questions for these beings, and lo and behold, a few weeks later the sleeping man furiously wrote a manuscript that answered all of them. Along with later communications from the “revelators,” that manuscript became The Urantia Book. These “direct-trance” mediums were hugely popular in the second half of the 1800s, and apparently even the famed psychologist philosopher William James was lured by one. (In the 1990s many followers of The Urantia Book started to hear celestial voices of their own, though the Foundation hasn’t acknowledged that any are legitimate but, instead has done quite a bit to discredit them.) “Psychoanalysis, hypnotism, intensive comparison, fail to show that the written or spoken messages of this individual have origin in his own mind,” Sadler wrote in his 1929 book The Mind at Mischief: Tricks and Deceptions of the Subconscious and How to Cope With Them. The original human transmitter’s name is never revealed, but in Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery, from which much of the above is found, author Martin Gardner (who for many years wrote forScientific American and other legitimate publications) makes the case that it was Sadler’s brother-in-law, Wilfred Custer Kellogg. Sadler had been duped by other channelers in the past, most notably Ellen White, the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism, but he believed his brother-in-law was the real thing.” - Megan Giller, “Cults, Conspiracies and the Twisted History of Sleepytime Tea,” Van Winkle’s, February 1, 2016.