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   Robert Benchley once wrote there are many mysteries which humans haven't fathomed, and added: "Some of them might not even be worth fathoming." These words occasionally come to mind during Martin Gardner's lengthy, painstakingly researched investigation of The Urantia Book and it is smallish surrounding cult.

   The UB was published in 1955 and runs to two,097 pages of fairly standard holy-book material. An elaborate celestial hierarchy of swarming godlings and angel-analogues ruled by a supreme being ingenuously called the "Great I Am"; prophecies and revelations; a revisionist lifetime of Christ; and so on. Weird neologisms abound, as with Scientology ("Urantia" is just Earth), and therefore are gleefully quoted. Outsiders find it odd that some regard the UB as validated by its predictions of scientific developments prior to the 1955 publication date. For UB fundamentalists, the thing is, it's an piece of faith that the text was finalized in 1934.

   The roots of UB go deeper, and Gardner relentlessly explores them. In the 19th century we meet Sister Ellen White, prophetess of Seventh Day Adventism (itself a splinter cult formed in the wake of William Miller's dud prophecy that Christ would return in 1844), issuing contradictory decrees direct from God and producing sacred writings by shameless plagiarism. One disciple, Dr William Sadler, broke loose in the Adventists but ironically -- as Gardner persuasively argues -- re-enacted White's autocracy and compulsive plagiarism within the UB movement.

   The story is that the first inklings from the UB were "channelled" during sleep by Sadler's brother-in-law Wilfred Custer Kellogg -- a relative of the Dr John Kellogg of bowel-obsession fame, recently portrayed in the movie The Road to Wellville, who lurks on the fringes of the story and whose moderately irrelevant health fads earn him an entertaining chapter here. This channelling began in 1911 or 1912, with a spurt in 1923 when Sadler's religious discussion group posed 4,000 questions which Wilfred supposedly answered in a 472-page MS dictated by Higher Intelligences and prepared by his own hand while asleep one evening....

The Urantia Book

   A cult was created. The divinely authored UB grew even larger. Only wicked sceptics would pay attention to the rumour that mere humans were asked to contribute bits, or even lots.

   Various text comparisons, discussed at gruelling length and based on computer analysis, suggest to the eye of unfaith that Sadler wrote large chunks of UB and personally re-edited the entire book. Their own writings are visibly recycled, including ugly racist views along with a powerful flavour of Adventism. Other contributors pinched material from further afield. The bombshell came in 1992, when the Urantian disciple Matthew Block documented many flagrant plagiarisms in UB, including a damning list of platitudes lifted completely from the very first 33 pages of 1 particular dictionary of quotations.

   Block's faith was just strengthened by his discovery from the Higher Intelligences' cleverness in using mere human words for their awesome purposes. UB fundamentalists are similarly unimpressed with this gospel's scientific deficiencies, also voluminously discussed here. If a prediction is correct, UB is confirmed. If something is missing which Higher Intelligences should logically have told us, the reason being UB doesn't dispense "unearned" knowledge (except sometimes): humanity have to get out the hard way. Gross scientific errors, like mixing up Fahrenheit and Kelvin for stellar temperatures, are merely "time bombs" inserted to encourage human self-reliance and stop people treating UB as inerrant truth -- which some nevertheless do.

   Inevitably the UB movement suffered schisms. The funniest of those involve the US Urantia Foundation's tries to preserve rigid copyright charge of a holy book whose authors are, officially, intangible astral entities. You will find a punchline: in February 1995, a US judge declared the UB to stay in the general public domain -- though why anyone should need it beats me.

   Martin Gardner has spent more than 40 years boldly and effectively attacking the dragons of irrationality ... but finally, perhaps, he's running short of major new targets. The UB cult is mildly funny and never detectably life-threatening (yes, the Branch Davidians and Waco get dragged in at one point, but the connection is Adventist, not Urantian). Maybe it's not funny enough: more often than once Gardner feels the need to pep some misconception by invoking his fictitious numerologist Dr Matrix, to little effect. I really hope he's joking when he argues -- as Gardner, not as the charlatan Matrix -- that the UB sequence of 7 small numbers, followed after undisclosed intervals with a 6-digit and then a 7-digit number, is an intentional "signature" of Wilfred Custer Kellogg (7, 6 and 7 letters). This really is tenuous to begin vacuity.

   Although Urantia contains fascinating and entertaining segments, the sheer weight of lovingly researched, meticulously reproduced documentation forms a leaden ballast towards the humour of it all. Better organization may have helped: tighter editing, a topic index to make it usable as a reference work, a family-tree chart to clarify the relationships of too many Kelloggs. Ultimately, one give in to saying, a massive sledgehammer has been delivered to bear on a few minor nuts.