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A Flight of Fancy
Now just as an exercise and perhaps for enlightenment, imagine that you were granted the opportunity to present your views about The Urantia Book on some kind of TV host show that looked at significant happenings around the world. Your TV interviewer gives you an uninterrupted 5 to 10 minutes during which you describe your views on the principal teachings of the book. The questions that follow from the audience are mainly about how Urantia Book readers differ in their views from mainline Christians and you feel elated about how you have handled the questions. Then some gook from the audience gets up and asks, "Do you believe in fairies, hobgoblins, leprechauns, evil spirits, poltergeists, magic, all that kind of thing." Your answer is almost straight from the book, "The Urantia Book has a modern outlook on science," you say, "It accepts the evolution of mankind, has sections on the origins of our universe and solar system, the geology of the Earth, and so on, some of which were quite new when received in the mid-1930's. It says that science teaches man to speak the new language of mathematics and trains our minds along lines of exacting precision thus stabilizing philosophy through the elimination of error. In doing so it purifies religion, in particular through its effects on destroying primitive superstition." (907)
Feeling self-satisfied your turn the stage back to your questioner. "Then how come," this gook asks, "that this Urantia Book not only includes a story about Adam and Eve rebelling against God just as Christian fundamentalists would have us believe, but also tells about a superman son of theirs who marries a superwoman and between them they have invisible children who create invisible spirits called midwayers. Then it says that some of these invisible midwayers also rebelled against God and became the evil spirits that possess people and cause them to throw fits and all that kind of thing." You stutter that possession by evil spirits only happened prior to Jesus resurrection and the coming of the Spirit of Truth..." That is as far as you get before the laughter and jeers from the floor causes the host to signal for a commercial break, during which you try to offer a quick explanation to your host. "But this book of yours really does talk of Adam and Eve and invisible children that became evil spirits?" he asks. You start to protest, he says answer yes or no, and you are forced to answer, "Well yes but..." Sensing chaos for his show, your host tells you that your time is up and they must go on with the next interview.
The midwayer story is, of course, by no means the only one that could cause disaster in any TV host show interview. A question I often ask myself is why are they there. I believe the story is basically true though it may (or may not) be told in some symbolic way because so much of what it says is way beyond the normal gamut of human experience or understanding. But it could quite easily have been told differently without stretching the truth beyond reasonable limits and in a way that would not jeopardize a public exposition of the content of the book. I do not believe that this kind of material is in the book because of some lack of understanding of we humans on the part of the revelators. It is there because they do understand us and because, for some reason, it is necessary. The question I ask is why is it necessary? If the origins of the secondary midwayers, and some other material, had been omitted or glossed over instead of being discussed in detail, the content of the book would not appear to have had a diminished spiritual value. And perhaps it would have been a lot easier to present the book to the scientifically-minded and the academic community.
In asking such questions we must retain our humility. The Revelators did what they did for a good reason. It is in trying to garner what the reasons for its peculiarities might be that we may get a better concept of how this book is to fulfill its purpose.
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