2025 RationalWiki 'Oregon Plan' Fundraiser

There is no RationalWiki without you. We are a small non-profit with no staff—we are hundreds of volunteers who document pseudoscience and crankery around the world every day. We will never allow ads because we must remain independent. We cannot rely on big donors with corresponding big agendas. We are not the largest website around, butwe believe we play an important role in defending truth and objectivity.

Fighting pseudoscience isn't free.
We are 100% user-supported! Help and donate $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can today with!

Donations so far: $8765.50Goal: $10000

The Urantia Book

From RationalWiki

Jump to navigation Jump to search

A dime a dozen

Divine scribblings

v -t -e

The Urantia Book is a collection of allegedlychannelled writings mostly compiled from the 1930s, published by the Urantia Foundation in 1955. The texts combineChristianity and an allegedhistory of the work and teachings ofJesus with acosmology ofextraterrestrial spirit beings. The book presents an elaboratepseudohistory of theuniverse (the book actually claims there are many universes, superuniverses, and so on), and that the name of planet Earth in this cosmology is "Urantia". The portion on the life of Jesus remains fairly close to theBible stories of his life and teachings, except that in theUrantia Book Jesus was the most important spirit being in this universe who came to "Urantia" (Earth) to solidify his superior status, and the ideas oforiginal sin or any need for Jesus to atone for human sins are rejected. In this, it departs from mostChristian theology. The life of Jesus, as told in Part IV ofThe Urantia Book, is presented in great detail with paintings and illustrations at theTruthbook website.^[1]

For whatever reason,Urantia had some popularity among somerock musicians in the 1970s, and influenced some of the albums by bands like Kansas and Spirit. Kerry Livgren of Kansas, who later became aborn-again evangelical, cites theUrantia Book as a way station between his previousagnosticism and his later evangelical Christianity and states that he eventually came to reject theUrantia Book as a false portrayal of Christ.^{[Note 1]} In fact, if you've ever taken a sip of what's called "Sleepytime Tea", you've had a taste of the Urantia life; Mo Siegel, a founder of Celestial Seasonings, is the current president of the Urantia Foundation and cites the book as a key part of the tea business.^[2]

The Urantia Book includes quite a bit ofscience woo from the 1930's presented as authoritative fact. Many of these suppositions, which were largely accepted in the 1930s, have since been disproven, which casts doubt on the purported supernatural origin of theUrantia Book and points to a purely human origin. Among other things the book endorseseugenics at one point. Each writing in the book credits one or more supernatural authors, who have names like "Divine Counseler", "Perfector of Wisdom", "Brilliant Evening Star", and "Universal Censor". The actual authorship has been traced to aSeventh Day Adventist splinter-group inChicago, and allegations have also been made that some of the book isplagiarized from earlier writings.Martin Gardner wrote an extensive study of the book, and of its quite human, and plagiarized, origin.^[3]