Urantia Book and other channeled works

Perhaps the source of contention arises from the fact of the title "...and other channeled works" which seems to co-opt (imply?) the implication that The Urantia Book was channeled, since that is something no one who takes it seriously claims.

I would advise that the OP post more collaboration-inducing titles in the future.

That being said, there's an open question which the OP has raised, and it shouldn't be ignored:

Quote:

A hypothetical for you: The UB was published in 1955. It is now 60 years later. The circumstances in the universe have changed and the celestials want to provide us updated information. The original group of people isn't around anymore. What would happen if those exact same celestials tried to provide new information in the exact same way?

I think the answers that "the celestials didn't plan to" or "they have better things to do" or "epochal revelations only come very infrequently" are missing the point. The OP is trying to hit on a question that's very important and the question of authorship is only going to grow in the future. If we're waiting on another 1960 years for real answers, we need to consider textual analysis, stylometry, even word association experiments. There's a lot about TUB that is unanswered. Are we going to run from the facts? There's no need. TUB exists already, and there is some method by which it came into existence. The fact that the origin of the papers is obscure only makes the need for clarity greater, and makes the questions involved more pressing.

I personally find the lack of details about the origin of the papers disturbing because other people find it disturbing. The question of authorship is the one thing that prevents me from sharing what I find interesting and useful in the papers more broadly. I'm in the skeptic's corner because there's plenty to be skeptical about, not because I want to reduce TUB to something it's not, but also not to protect it artificially, because written works stand on their own merits.

Case in point: People copied portions, or complete copies of the Bible for 2000 years, the first 1500 years of which writing materials, literacy, and the ability to write were so scarce that the three only converged in the very rich, or perhaps the life-savings of several well-organized lower income people put together. But nevertheless people all over the world found and used these scarce resources to copy the Bible for century after century after century, something with a huge marginal utility cost to the people copying it. We have so many copies of Biblical manuscripts, from so many different time periods in fact that the integrity of the text to the originals is almost entirely beyond dispute, even among its strongest critics. The Bible is anti-fragile in this regard.

Does The Urantia Book have any of that? Nope. Not only do we lack multiple handwritten copies from various regions to determine the legitimacy of the original work, but we don't have flesh and blood authors to make the question of legitimacy as such meaningful, even if it were to be discovered. Suppose the attributions in the text are true. All of the authorship attributions only have meaning if you take the book at its word. Even then, you only have what the book says about the authors to know who or what they are. So the question of authorship is denied legitimacy in any sense that would be empirically satisfying. As long as the method of their inception stays nebulous, I think this is the grit between TUB and mainstream adoption.

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