Hello all.
First let me say that I'm glad to have been allowed to make posts here as I have been gleaning information from truthbook and this forum for some time now. As an inquisitive soul, I'm sure I'll have many questions to ask and topics to discuss in the future, but for now I figured I'd give a brief overview of how I came to find TUB.
To frame my perspective, I'll start by saying I'm currently in my early 30's and I've been in a Christian household all those years (from Apostolic to pentecostal and eventually non-denominational). I say Christian household because If I look back with the clarity of hindsight, I've probably always had some issues with traditional Christianity and the Bible. I grew up learning about it of course, even completed grades 3-5 in a school managed by my church at the time. Heck, my career path in media is largely based on Christianity and the Christian market. Over all this time, I always felt like there was truth in the Bible, but as a self-described person of logic and reason, I always felt I wasn't getting the full story or find myself saying things like "Is that really how it happened though?" Even before discovering TUB, I was already convinced that there was no need for Science and Religion to be at complete odds.
Fast forward to 2020. By this point places and churches were starting to lockdown, but I hadn't really been attending any 'religiously' except for....well as I'm not sure about the rules on name dropping yet..I'll call it 'Revelation Church.' The messages I listened to from here resonated with me more than my past experiences, but something in me was still unsatisfied.
It was probably around Mid-march 2020 that I decided to really delve into my problems with Christianity. Googling questions online, I stumbled across a particular Quora thread about what "Hell" really is. I won't get into the answer here, but it certainly doesn't conflict with info I've read to date in TUB. Naturally, I wondered how somebody could give such an answer with such authority on the subject. That's how I came across the Human channelings of biblical and historical figures. Reading these passages, whether or not credible was pretty eye-opening to me, but I won't discuss more of that here (as per rules). Now sometime later (mid 2021) I had gone through quite a few readings and embraced the idea of Divine Love Christianity to the point where I was finally communicating with God on a personal level. Something I had never really fathomed in my time on earth to that point. Sure I knew about the process of prayer, but I always felt mine weren't genuine enough to be considered prayer. But now I've even transitioned over to calling God my Father, which finally feels natural, much like my conversations with and worship for him.
From there it's felt like a hop skip and a jump to this point I'm at with TUB. Basically, after a little digging, I found a forum that the same Quora poster (with the description of hell) helped administrate. This was a forum dedicated to the Midwayers and the many prompts in life specifically related to "11:11" and similar phenomena. That forum has been helpful in learning about the Midwayers, but I also started to see some references to The Urantia Book there. In fact, they have a sub-forum dedicated to TUB discussion (unfortunately my membership hasn't been approved there yet). After some research of my own on it, and learning that the contents of the book were channeled, perhaps similar to what I had read to that point, I delved into Truthbook.com's search section. I would type questions that would pop up in my head and see what TUB might have to say. I must say, the first time I read some of the contents I was taken aback because, as I'm sure many of you have felt, this did not read/sound like either the writings of a Human or the writings of a Human channeling (At least as I'd come to recognize in tone). This was something else entirely different it seemed. More importantly, I find myself almost entirely satisfied with most of the explanations of how things are described in TUB. That's something I never fully got from the Bible and even the channeled messages from the Divine love teachings can occasionally feel diluted with Human thought. My understanding is that Love is the basis of all, and I feel that learning that through all these different channels is ultimately what I'm intended to take away from my time here on Urantia/Earth.
As this is no longer looking so "brief" despite my efforts to omit quite a few details, let me now just say that I look forward to discussing future topics with any who would take time to do so
It's really my first time posting on a forum like this for quite some years, but I'm glad to be here.
P.S. I realize I may have gotten dangerously close to one of the banned topics, so I may have to ask for some leniency