Once or twice a week I volunteer to sort book donations for our local Friends of the Library biannual book sale. This particular event, held in May and October and sponsored by the Tompkins County Friends of the Library, is one of the biggest used book sales in the United States -- we process a half a million books a year. It's an amazing event, raises much-needed money for our library system, and is a must-attend for any bibliophiles.
It hardly needs saying that the sale is one of the high points of the year for me. I always come back with a huge box of books, because I clearly don't have enough books already. As the volunteers' presale is on April 27, I've already been snooping around up and down the aisles in the warehouse, scouting out what books I want to pounce on before anyone else has an opportunity to get their grubby mitts on 'em.
Sorting incoming books is a lot of fun, not only because the people I work with are lovely, but because it's highly entertaining to see what people choose to donate. I've noticed that there seem to be themes -- one day we'll be inundated with books on anthropology, the next gardening, the one after that murder mysteries or religion or science fiction. There's nothing odd about this, when you stop to think about it. We all have our obsessions, reading-material-wise, so when people clear out their shelves it's understandable that we'd end up with piles of donations from the same genres.
When I was there last Wednesday, the Theme of the Day was the occult. We had psychic stuff and reincarnation and crystals and astrology and Tarot card interpretation, as well as about twenty books by the famously loony Graham Hancock. None of this was all that remarkable. But then I ran into three copies of a book I kinda-sorta remembered hearing about -- The Urantia Book -- and by the third time, I asked one of the other sorters if she knew what it was.
She didn't. She, like myself, had heard the name, knew it was connected with the occult somehow, but that was about it.
So when I got home, I looked it up, and it's quite a story.
The whole thing seems to have been the brainchild of one William S. Sadler, although Sadler said he acted only as a channel and that the pages of the original manuscript "materialized" between 1924 and 1935. Sadler is a curious figure; he was a doctor and an early "health food" promoter, whose wife Lena (Kellogg) Sadler was the niece of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes. Sadler started out being a debunker of psychic claims, and in fact wrote a book called The Mind at Mischief in which he exposed fraudulent mediums and their methods of hoodwinking the gullible.
But then... something happened. It's unclear if Sadler had a change of heart, or if (like the cynical, bored book publishers who decided to out-conspiracy the conspiracy theorists in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) he figured he could come up with his own loony idea that would fool people way better than the two-bit mediums he'd debunked. Whichever it was, in 1924 he launched into a claim that he had become the focus of a "strange communication from a group called the Celestials."
So he and some friends got together to write it all down.
These writings, which run to two thousand pages, are what were eventually compiled into The Urantia Book. It wasn't published until 1955 -- because, Sadler said, there'd been questions he and his team had that needed to be "clarified by the Celestials."
But when it finally did hit the presses... wow.
The "Urantia Foundation" -- formed to coordinate printing and sales of the book -- reports that it's still a hot seller. Between 1990 and 2000, annual sales went up by over a factor of five (from 7,000 to 38,000). It became downloadable in 2010, and since then averages around 60,000 downloads a year. Brad Gooch, in his book Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, says that the number of Urantia study groups and online discussion groups has been going up steadily in the last ten years and is showing no sign of leveling off.
I'll be honest; I haven't read the book itself and have no real intention to, but the excerpts I've found online strike me as fairly innocuous. There's a lot of talk about all of us having the "Divine Spark" or an "Indwelling Presence" that guides us toward good behavior, and a "Thought Adjuster" that steers us away from sinfulness. It seems to have no particular quarrel with other religions and philosophies; the attitude is that they all got some things right and some things wrong, so y'know, we're all on this journey together, live and let live, I'm okay you're okay everyone's okay. And aliens, but they're okay, too.
Honestly, it's all pretty tolerant and friendly-sounding. Me, I'd take this over evangelical Christianity in a heartbeat, even if Sadler did make the whole thing up.
What's curious about the people who believe this really is a more-or-less divine revelation from all-knowing Celestial Beings, though, is when it gets to the parts about science -- because in a lot of places, it got the science wrong. And the really interesting part is that the things they got wrong were, oddly enough, wrong in exactly the way that you'd expect from an entirely non-Celestial human who was writing in the 1920s. It describes the formation of the Solar System via something that sounds an awful lot like the 1905 Chamberlin-Moulton Planetesimal Hypothesis, which was widely accepted in the 1920s but ruled out on the basis of inconsistencies with known physical principles by Lyman Spitzer and Henry Norris Russell in 1940. It states that the Andromeda Galaxy is "almost one million light years away" -- once again, the accepted value in the 1920s, before better measurements showed that it's well over double that distance. Back then, too, the whole "fundamental particle" thing was really taking off, and there was no certainty of how deep the well went -- whether particles would prove to be divisible into ever tinier and tinier pieces with no end, or if there really were fundamental, indivisible particles. Well, Urantia says that all the known particles are composed of a fundamental smaller piece called an "ultimaton;" electrons, for example, are made of a hundred of them.
Unfortunately for Urantia and the Celestials, however, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, one of the most extensively-tested models in all of science, finds no evidence of "ultimatons," and electrons really do appear to be fundamental and indivisible.
So my problem is that if you're expecting me to accept that this really is some kind of revealed truth -- either from a deity, or at the very least, from some super-smart aliens -- then why'd they get the science demonstrably wrong? And if they got the facts wrong, on what basis should I believe anything else they say?
As generally "nice" as their philosophy seems to be, I have my doubts.
Anyhow, now I know way more about The Urantia Book than I did. If you're intrigued, and going to be in Ithaca during the first week of May, you can pick up a copy or three at the book sale. Today I'll be heading down in an hour or so to do my shift sorting more books. I wonder what the Theme of the Day will be? Sports? True Crime? Graphic Novels? Self-Help?
Amish Romances? I kid you not, there's a whole shelf full of Amish Romances.
When you deal with a half a million books a year, there's bound to be something for everyone.
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