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The Urantia Book with an A or not-A viewpoint. When first coming into contact with a book purporting to be the Fifth Epochal Revelation, for those born into our Western habits of thinking, it is almost impossible not to immediately confront ourselves with the question of whether or not we are dealing with absolute truth.
The book makes this statement: "In olden times the fetish word of authority was a fear-inspiring doctrine, the most terrible of all tyrants which enslave men. A doctrinal fetish will lead mortal man to betray himself into the clutches of bigotry, fanaticism, superstition, intolerance, and the most atrocious of barbarous cruelties. Modern respect for wisdom and truth is but the recent escape from the fetish-making tendency up to the higher levels of thinking and reasoning. Concerning the accumulated fetish writings which various religionists hold as sacred books, it is not only believed that what is in the book is true, but also that every truth is contained in the book. If one of these sacred books happens to speak of the earth as being flat, then, for long generations, otherwise sane men and women will refuse to accept positive evidence that the planet is round." (969) Surely these words contain a warning about how we should look upon and interpret The Urantia Book? (fetish: inanimate object irrationally worshipped, Oxford dictionary)
Within the next decade, our habits of thinking about what is wholly true and what is wholly false will undergo a forced change. With that change, difficulties that have presently arisen because of differences in the way some readers and the Revelators view truth in The Urantia Book will evaporate into nothingness--along with the sound of one hand clapping.
Reference:
Kosko, B. (1993) "Fuzzy Thinking" (HarperCollins, London, 1994)
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