First, an apology to all those members of the Gideons movement whose perception of what the Gideons are all about is entirely different from mine.

    My concept of Gideonism arose over a twenty year period in which my work took me to many countries, East, West, and Center, and included many lonely weekends passed in semi-seclusion in hotel rooms.

   Of those hundreds of rooms, I cannot remember one, no matter how remotely situated, that did not have a Gideons' Bible located in one of the drawers of the furnishings.

    Always, the Gideon Bible seemed to be in a pristine state of newness--which led me to wonder whether they were ever read.

    What kind of people put bibles in hotel rooms in remote corners of Japan, India, Thailand, etc. I had never met a Gideon so could only speculate.

    The total cost must have been many hundreds of millions of dollars. So perhaps a typical Gideon was a dedicated fund-raiser, whose main purpose in life was the placing of lots of bibles in public places.

    Could Gideonism penetrate the Urantia movement?

    Two comments from The Urantia Book come to mind. One that makes a nine on the Richter scale states:

    "The religious challenge of this age is to those farseeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight who will dare to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness. Such a new and righteous vision of morality will attract all that is good in the mind of man and challenge that which is best in the human soul." (43)

    I've always felt the words, "exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness" are self-referential to The Urantia Book. If so then surely we are being instructed to construct new and appealing philosophies from the materials given us in that book. But nowhere are we instructed to credit the book as source. Maybe that is an important point!
   The other quotation from the book is:

   "The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must no longer be sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions." (2090)

    This task is to be accomplished "through this revelation," not "by this revelation." We should have learned by now that Christianity, as it presently is, will never accept a new revelation. Maybe Revelations 22:18 has Christians running scared. And maybe there are a multitude of other reasons.

    Whatever the cause, time has now shown that The Urantia Book cannot, by itself, do these particular tasks that the revelators have asked of us--but its teachings can.

    Of one other thing we can be quite certain. A Gideonist approach to the spreading of The Urantia Book will remain totally ineffective at achieving these same tasks. It's time to try alternatives.

KTG