Urantia book club provokes questions on a cosmological scale
According to a CU book club, we don’t live on Earth. We live on Urantia.
The Urantia Book Club started in the early 1980s with the purpose of exposing students to concepts presented in the Urantia Book.
The Urantia Book is a cosmology-based synthesis of religion, science and philosophy.
According to the book, Urantia is a planet among “Many evolutionary inhabited planets,” and “Part of one of the seven super universes of time and space that circle the never-beginning, never-ending creation of divine perfection.”
Investor and Boulder-local Donald Green heads the club.
“We’re pretty low-key. We’re not trying to get in anyone’s face or organize some big thing. We’re primarily trying to disseminate information,” Green said.
The non-profit Urantia Foundation first published the book in 1955 after allegedly being authored by numerous super-mortal deities.
It is published in eight different languages and there are over 650,000 copies in print worldwide.
The book embraces and organizes existing human knowledge. It tries to nudge this knowledge forward–beyond the known–and into a new frontier, according to an Urantia pamphlet.
Green is well aware of the skepticism Urantia arouses.
“Everybody has their own opinions,” Green said. “If you read the papers and it doesn’t make sense to you, then you put them down and move on to something that does make sense.”
Every Tuesday and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Green and fellow club volunteers, most of whom are not CU students, set up their Urantia exhibit in the UMC. The exhibit is comprised of posters, pamphlets and the book itself.
Green said he tends to sit aside and watch students explore the exhibit before he initiates conversation with them.
“It’s really nuts and bolts stuff. ‘What is god really like?’ In two pages,” said Natalie Pusey, a senior geography major.
Pusey was skeptical after perusing a Urantia club pamphlet.
“I was just about to ask where I send my check, but here it is,” Pusey said, after noticing payment information for purchasing Urantia books on the last page of the pamphlet.
Sophomore business major Mike Jensen was equally dubious at first glance.
“The glossy cover and bubble captions inside make it seem like a new-agey tabloid,” Jensen said.
Jensen did not believe in the details presented by Urantia but maintained an open mind.
“Everybody wants answers to the great, eternal questions,” Jensen said. “And if these guys provide answers and they work for you, then go with it.”
Reading through the outline of concepts, Jensen observed similarities between Urantia and Christianity.
“God, trinity, celestial beings. It’s all Christian doctrine,” Jensen said.
This is where Green disagrees.
“This is not a Christian work,” Green said. “But the main points of Christianity and other monotheistic religions apply.”
Urantia tries to answer many of the classic big questions. What is god? What does it mean to be human? What is the geography of the universe?
Urantia goes a few steps further and spills over into psychology, geology, governmental philosophy and evolution. It even repudiates Darwin’s theory of random selection.
“Life must have somehow come-or been manipulated from—outer space,” states one Urantia pamphlet.
The club plans to organize beginner study groups and give informational lectures on the Urantia book after a nine-year hiatus from university presence.
On April 14 from 6 to 9 p.m. club volunteer Stan Hartman, a local psychotherapist, will be giving a free presentation outlining Urantian concepts at CU’s planetarium.
For more information, visit the club’s Web site at www.urantiabookclub.org. Donald Green can be reached by e-mail at dsgreen1@comcast.net or by phone at (303)530-5216. The club’s office is currently located in room 122 of the UMC.
