The Urantia Book is over 2,000 pages long and claims to contain revelations from superhuman beings which "correct" the errors and omissions of the Bible. "Urantia" is the name these superhumans give to our planet. According to these supermortal beings, Earth is the 606th planet in Satania which is in Norlatiadek which is in Nebadon which is in Orvonton which revolves around Havona where the Great I AM dwells.. According to Martin Gardner, the Urantia Book contains many Adventist doctrines along with an array of bizarre claims about planets and names of angels and other useless drivel.
Sadler got his start working for Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, Adventist surgeon, health and diet author, and brother of cornflake king William Keith Kellogg. These are the same Kellogg brothers who were featured and lampooned in the movie "The Road to Wellville."
reader comments
Oct 1996
I've been reading your Skeptic's Dictionary and I like most of what I read. I have to ask you, though: the Urantia Book was "allegedly" channeled by William Kellogg??!!
I've been reading the Urantia Book for 15 years and I have NEVER heard that claim made before! Did Martin Gardner make that claim? And if so, where did he get his information? The identity of the human being who wrote down (and it was NOT channeling, according to Dr. Sadler) the papers of the Urantia Book has never been revealed. Dr. Sadler, I understand, said that he and the others who knew this person had been sworn to secrecy because it was felt that the message of the book itself was more important by far than the person wrote the words down. No human name was to be associated with the book, ever.
reply: I would imagine that you are not the only reader of the book who has never heard that the Urantia Book was channeled by Wilfred Kellogg. The book itself claims that the Urantia papers "were authorized by high deity authorities and written by numerous supermortal personalities." [Origins] Sadler and his group tried to avoid associating the origin of the Urantia Book with words like spiritualism . The word channeling was not used in those days, of course. But when you claim that an individual, whom you will not name, wrote a book but the authors were really "supermortal personalities," then you have claimed the book was channeled in today's New Age terminology. Gardner's research uncovered the author as Wilfred Kellogg. You can read about it in his book and articles, listed below. Of course, Sadler's version differs from Gardner's.
Sadler claims he and other equally brilliant men could not detect any other type of psychic phenomenon except revelation from on high when they examined the "author." Their author was not telepathic, clairvoyant, a spirit medium, nor did he go into trances or do automatic writing. Sadler also declared that his man was not insane (actually he says he did not have a split personality). One thing Sadler and his illuminati seem to have failed to consider was the possibility of fraud. Or maybe they were in on the con. Who knows? In any case, Sadler was right about one thing: focusing on who wrote the book takes attention away from the content of the book. If you are looking for spiritual teachings, apparently this book has plenty of them and many people find these teachings agreeable. For those of us who are no longer on a spiritual quest, such books are mainly of interest because of the byzantine intrigue surrounding their authorship and the people who would invent such stuff. Gardner himself says: "Why do I waste time on such a pretentious tome? Two reasons: One, the Urantia movement is gaining new recruits. More interestingly, the book's origin is a capital mystery." According to Gardner, Iola Martin and Mrs. Harold Sherman (members of the original Urantia movement in Chicago) revealed to him that Wilfred Kellogg wrote and dictated the Urantia Book. All the sordid details are revealed by Gardner. The one I find most fascinating, though I don't know why, is that Wilfred Kellogg, his wife, Anna Kellogg and Dr. Sadler's wife, Lena Kellogg (Anna's sister), all had the same grandfather, John Preston Kellogg, who was the father of William Keith Kellogg (the cornflake king) and Dr. John Kellogg. The latter did battle with Ellen G. White and was excommunicated from the Adventist church.
I also am unaware that there is a separatist 7th Day Adventist cult that uses the Urantia Book's teachings. To say that the book has Adventist teachings is like saying the Bible has Adventist teachings, when actually both books contain teachings used by all manner of religions and belief systems. The religions get their teachings from the books, not vice versa.
reply: As I understand it, Adventists interpret the Bible differently from other Christians, especially in their notions of the Millennium and The New Earth and in accepting the words of Ellen G. White as revelations.
I don't belong to any cult. There are groups of Urantia Book readers who get together and some of them are pretty weird, to my way of thinking, so I don't belong to any groups espousing the Urantia Book's teachings. I find the book's value in what it says and how I can apply those sayings to my own life-not anybody else's. (I add that I was raised a Catholic, left the church at 14, became an atheist and a devotee of Ayn Rand and finally read the Urantia Book 18 years later.)
reply: I guess we could say that you are on the road to Wellville!
There is no organized religion of any kind involved in the reading of the Urantia Book. There are no "thou shalts" or "thou shalt nots". There is no guilt. There is no "we've got the answers and we'll only tell you if you give us money". The only money I've spent is on the book itself, and I consider the price worth it.
reply: The fact that you and many other readers of the Urantia Book do not belong to any organized cult or religion does not mean that such a group doesn't exist. According to Gardner, such a group does exist and is growing.
I suspect that you have not read the book, as it's over 2000 pages long. I assume you are passing on the information that you found in Gardner's book. I find it hard to believe that Gardner, intelligent man that he is, would so lightly pass off a book by identifying it with an organized religion that really had and has nothing to do with the Urantia Book at all. It almost sounds as if he'd just recently heard about the book and asked someone and they said, "aw, it's some book some crackpot offshoot cult of the 7th Day Adventists uses."
reply: Believe me, it is not the length of the Urantia Book which keeps me from poring over its pages. I've probably read over 2,000 pages of Gardner over the years! In any case, you underestimate Gardner and I suspect you haven't read his book on Urantia, either.
I applaud the idea of debunking all the stuff you include in your dictionary. It's a great service. I only ask that you do a little more solid research on the Urantia Book before tossing off such a casual and inaccurate review.
Sharon Carthy
reply: ok. In the future, before tossing off an inaccurate review, I'll do more solid research.
further reading
Seventh-day Adventist Home Page
Gardner, Martin. On the Wild Side (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1992), chapters 8, 13 and 14.
Gardner, Martin, Urantia : the great cult mystery ( Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1995).