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Urantia Book Poll


Davros of Skaro

The UB. Made up, or inspired?   

51 members have voted

  1. 1. Is the Urantia Book fact, or fake?

    • Real channeled knowledge ?
    • Person, or people fakery?

This poll is closed to new votes


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2 minutes ago, danydandan said:

Will this is because of over reliance in anecdotal evidence and eye witness testimony. 

Once something like science steps in these become irrelevant. DNA testing, while not super accurate, is orders of magnitude more accurate than eye witnesses and anecdotal. Plus there is a massive issue with cognitive biases in law and forensic science.

 

The point here is that fact is fact,. Regardless of whether or not it can be documented. Which I'm getting negative blowback about for saying.

I'm being told that if there is a fact that can't be proven (like in a court) then it's not a fact. It's not the truth.

Yet we have proof that my preceding statement is not true. Convicts have been released.

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Will Due said:

 

The point here is that fact is fact,. Regardless of whether or not it can be documented. Which I'm getting negative blowback about for saying.

I'm being told that if there is a fact that can't be proven (like in a court) then it's not a fact. It's not the truth.

Yet we have proof that my preceding statement is not true. Convicts have been released.

 

 

Yeah a fact is something known to be true and testable. We can't know something we can't prove, thus it isn't a fact it's conjecture.

Edited by danydandan
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21 minutes ago, Will Due said:

 

I understand psyche. But let me ask you this. 

In a court of law, when a man is innocent but he can't document to prove his innocence while other circumstantial evidence indicates guilt, should this man be convicted?

Yes right?

Many times this has happened.

Recently people have been freed from prison after serving lengthy sentences for decades. Now we have new DNA technologies that can provide documentation that proves their innocence that wasn't available at the time of trial.

Fact does not change. Neither does truth. 

Time though, does change things sometimes. Even the facts of the lack of documentation that were used to convict once, are then sometimes used again to prove the truth of innocence. 

 

 

Will

That's what happens when anecdote meets fact. You are looking at it backwards. 

Anecdotes got the innocent party in prison. Facts simply showed the fault in the anecdote. 

Science is fact, superstition is anecdote. That's exactly why science errodes religion and superstition. 

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23 minutes ago, Will Due said:

The point here is that fact is fact. Regardless of whether or not it can be documented. Which I'm getting negative blowback about for saying.

I'm being told that if there is a fact that can't be proven (like in a court) then it's not a fact. It's not the truth.

Yet we have proof that my preceding statement is not true. Convicts have been released.

The UB originating from something other than humans is NOT a fact, it's an unevidenced opinion. That's not what you want to hear but it's true none the less. 

cormac

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4 hours ago, Will Due said:

 

A person observes a green sedan heading west bound on Bourbon St. passing the McDonalds at 1:41 PM on such and such date.

No one else observed this. There is no documentation that can prove it. No video. No Google maps data.

If this person relates the fact of having observed a fact (to someone else) should he or she, without being able to prove it, be considered a liar?

And does this then nullify that two facts did actually occur?

 

 

We would first have to determine whether green sedans exist, whether Bourbon St exists and whether there is a McDonalds on said street.

When we discover that green sedans were invented until 3 years after the event, Bourbon St never existed and McDonalds closed down 12 years ago, we have to question whether the person is actually telling the truth

And in the UB most of the verifiable facts can be shown to be incorrect.  All that is then left is conjecture surrounding unverifiable facts.

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2 hours ago, Will Due said:

n a court of law, when a man is innocent but he can't document to prove his innocence while other circumstantial evidence indicates guilt, should this man be convicted?

 

2 hours ago, Will Due said:

Recently people have been freed from prison after serving lengthy sentences for decades. Now we have new DNA technologies that can provide documentation that proves their innocence that wasn't available at the time of trial

Hi Will

Using the criminal system for comparison is a faulty comparison for an argument to start with because of inconsistent variables like humans. Science looks at what is demonstratable, repeatable and can be achieved independently by others.

 

jmccr8

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@Will Due
 

Quote

about this issue you've brought up.

Wait, wait... you brought it up. That's what makes this exchange different from many others about UB with its admirers, and different from "preaching" or missionary work, what makes this exchange a discussion. Don't lose that.

Quote

He was a natural born skeptic I think.

A bit of advice. Whenever anybody says, "Mary was a real skeptic ...," every reader here knows what comes next: Mary is about to bite into some enchilada grande of woo. So, best not to go there. Better to just let Mary have her say, whatever that is, and move along from there.

Let me unpack Dr Sadler's statement from near the bottom and work my way up.

Quote

Remember: You could appreciate a good poem—even if you did not know the author. Likewise, you could enjoy a symphony even if you were ignorant of the composer.

The Urantia Book isn't offered as a work of fiction. It is a work of testimony about purported facts, and so who is testifying is usually relevant. The exception would be testimony that I can verify independently from the testimony itself. I can't do that for much of the UB. Worse, as many posters have pointed out, some of what can be checked turns out to be untrue.

At a minimum, then, we have an instance of "the preface problem" (searchable). The book contains a mix of true statements and false statements. A vast number of its statements cannot be checked directly. Whose testimony it is, therefore, is relevant to estimating the proportion of true statements among the mass of what cannot be checked.

Just to be sure I have the jargon correct:

Quote

The main reason for not revealing the identity of the "Contact Personality" is that the Celestial Revelators do not want any human being—any human name—ever to be associated with The Urantia Book.

I take that sentence to imply that there is a single human being (the Contact Personality) who has caused to be recorded information received from plural non-human sources (the Celestial Revelators).

Now, based on the lengthy list of excluded methods of communication, I erred to use the term "automatic writing" in an earlier post, but I don't see that I erred in my description-definition of that term ("the person holding the pen asserts that somebody else is choosing the words"). Maybe what I ought to have done is to come up with some neutral term, less suggestive of a specific method, and attached the definition to that.

Assuming that we're still both on the same page, I went through that long list of ways that unconscious contents might be expressed without conscious "censorship." After your mention of Freud when describing Sadler and his use of the term subconscious, I was cued to look for omissions related to Jung. Meh, I'd have had some orientation in that direction anyway, because of my appreciative reading of Jung.

Because it's a list of terms without defintions, I suppose "Visions - Automatic Dramatization" could cover an especially wide swath. The issue for our purposes, however, is what that term excludes by appearing on  this list of what the method is not. It is very difficult for me to see that it definitely excludes Jungian "active imagination."

Usually, when I drop some jargon like that without definition, I throw in "(searchable)" or some such. Although the term is searchable, I hesitate to do that here, because a big proportion of what comes up is a contemporary clinical practice, which I believe to be a faint and "safer" echo of what the term meant for Jung and his personal analysands.

I could be wrong about all of that, not least because words suck at describing private interior mental states. However, I understand Jung's active imagination to be defined by the quality of the unconscious contents experienced PLUS the conscious mind's stance towards that experience while it is unfolding.

QUALITY: It is not a matter of "seeing and hearing something that isn't there," but rather finding yourself situated in a coherent setting which is populated with autonomous sentient beings. That much could be said of  realistic vivid dreams, but there is the additional matter of conscious stance.

STANCE: This is complicated, because you are conscious enough of the imagined setting to participate in it meaningfully (part of what's "active" about it), but detached enough to let things unfold, and pay attention to their unfolding. For example, Yeats once described his mental state during a session of "guided imagery" (speaking of things that I don't find on the list): From his essay "Magic,"

Quote

Almost at once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me vivid images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had always understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could not change or shape.

If those two things combine, quality and stance, then on the one hand the subject is prone to "visionary experience," and yet also well situated to write about it afterwards, during normal waking consciousness.

ETA I would go so far as to add that suitability for later communication to a non-participant as a distinguishing feature of Jung's active imagination. Certainly that is why he had his analysands do it, to talk it over with him later, when they were in an ordinary state of socially interactive normal consciousness.

Let me stop here to see whether we still are on the same page. I retract the term automatic writing, and don't insist that Jung's active imagination or Yeats' guided imagery was the actual method. What I propose for agreement is:

- maybe we should call all of this something neutral, like the "Urantia process,"

- that the Urantia process does, in fact, involve a human person (apparently literally one person, I accept the term Contact Personality to designate him or her) who held the pen (or dictated the words, or ...) and asserted that somebody else chose the words,

- that as lengthy as Dr Sadler's list is, it does not exclude all the ways that the unconscious contents of the Contact Personalty could be consciously apprehended by that person.

On a point arising, forensic analysis: 

Quote

Yes. I've read somewhere years ago that it was done. With computers I think.

What I remember is that the results indicated that it was highly likely that more than one author was involved. Can't remember how many they came up with though. I think they said three or four.

All the text-based methods depend on the author(s) being unaware of or indifferent to the application of the method. So, for example, if I'm just typing away, I will use "short words" (like and, for instance) with some stable characteristic frequency. I don't know or care what that frequency is, and that's why it's characteristic of me. It's just my "style" (or lazy habit). Something unconscious, or at least something I'm not self-conscious about.

But suppose, for whatever reason, I wanted to fake that quote from Yeats. Fat chance that I'd successfully imitate a Nobel Laureate in Literature, but there's a good chance that I could at least make it so that "it didn't sound like me." To say nothing of Yeats himself, composing characters whose dialog doesn't "sound like him," so that they will be believable as fictional characters.

The text-based methods completely fail for material "edited" by somebody other than the author. Plural editors would ensure plural detected "voices," and if the editors' work rules forbade changing the content of any assertion, only its form, then the result would be as internally consistent as the source being edited.

Finally,

Quote

Even if they did, why wouldn't those folks from Chicago claim group authorship of such an unusual accomplishment? Wouldn't at least some of them come forward to do this?

There's a proverb: there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. I suspect that that saying is framed and hung on the wall of many ghost writers' work rooms.

Edited by eight bits
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@eight bits, do you know that The Urantia Book has been edited, from the initial publication? 

Dr Sadler edited it, this is common knowledge, thus, maybe it's a jump, but considering he has the authority to edit the book would you not jump to the conclusion that he then probably wrote it?

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Is there anything in this book, that was unknown to man when it first appeared, but has since become accepted fact ?

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5 hours ago, Will Due said:

 

A person observes a green sedan heading west bound on Bourbon St. passing the McDonalds at 1:41 PM on such and such date.

No one else observed this. There is no documentation that can prove it. No video. No Google maps data.

If this person relates the fact of having observed a fact (to someone else) should he or she, without being able to prove it, be considered a liar?

And does this then nullify that two facts did actually occur?

 

 

The fact that no one observed it but the one person does not nullify the claims of the one person.

However, since green sedans, McDonalds, and Bourbon streets do exist, the statement could be extrapolated to be true. 

But this is a mundane statement, with no bizarre occurrences, so my default position would be to take the claimant at his or her word. 

Unfortunately, if the claimant then proceeded to tell me that Elvis was driving the sedan, and that it had jets of fire instead of wheels and was suspended 2 feet off the ground while being pulled by 24 harnessed white mice, I would infer that they were in an altered state, or mentally unbalanced.

And what you are attempting to do by continually adding qualifiers to your original example is called leading the witness. You are trying to narrow down the responses until people have to admit that your interpretation is the only 'logical' one, since you are refusing to accept any other response.

Belief in claims should be proportional to the probability of the claim, and the relevance of the claim to the listener.

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9 minutes ago, Habitat said:

Is there anything in this book, that was unknown to man when it first appeared, but has since become accepted fact ?

No. Not really quite the opposite actually on a number of things. 

It claims the Moon and Mercury do not axially rotate. It claims that no element can have a number greater than one hundred electrons. It makes errors on the sun temperature. There are a few more. But only one has to he incorrect to show that it's not a revelation. It claims to be a revelation.

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13 minutes ago, danydandan said:

do you know that The Urantia Book has been edited, from the initial publication? 

Dr Sadler edited it, this is common knowledge, thus, maybe it's a jump, but considering he has the authority to edit the book would you not jump to the conclusion that he then probably wrote it?

I can't say that I knew it, but the portions that I've read seemed "edited" to me, so I just assumed that there was an editor or editors involved. OK, now I share in the common knowledge; thank you for that.

As to the "jump," I wouldn't personally make the leap. For example, I fully believe that George Yeats produced automatic writing which her husband William truly edited (that is, he didn't originate the material, but worked with material she provided to him). What's controversial is whether there was an incorporeal somebody else working with George, or whether she was the sole author of what her husband edited (even if she thought, and why not sincerely?, that there was somebody else involved with what she produced).

 

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13 minutes ago, danydandan said:

No. Not really quite the opposite actually on a number of things. 

It claims the Moon and Mercury do not axially rotate. It claims that no element can have a number greater than one hundred electrons. It makes errors on the sun temperature. There are a few more. But only one has to he incorrect to show that it's not a revelation. It claims to be a revelation.

Not a single one ? For something as lengthy as that, that seems incredible. Maybe Will has a different thought on that. I mean, even if  someone made a hundred guesses that were all entirely speculative, you'd expect the odd one to pop up.

Edited by Habitat
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4 hours ago, Will Due said:

The book's table of contents lists dozens I believe.

Wait, wait, wait.

Didn't you quote Dr. Sadler as stating that the aliens didn't want any human names associated with the book? Yet here you are telling us that "dozens" of people were involved.

Please explain, in your own words, how these two mutually exclusive statements don't conflict.

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35 minutes ago, Habitat said:

Is there anything in this book, that was unknown to man when it first appeared, but has since become accepted fact ?

Not that I am aware of.  But there is plenty in the book that has since been shown not to be true,   Almost all of the first section on the history of the world, evolution etc   Some of this was already known to be wrong at the time, but maybe not to the general public .....

Which is why the rest (that cannot be verified) is so suspect.

When someone tells you a story that contains contains verifiable facts, all of which are shown to be false, why would you believe anything else they say?

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@Habitat

Quote

Not a single one ? For something as lengthy as that, that seems incredible. Maybe Will has a different thought on that. I mean, even if  someone made a hundred guesses that were all entirely speculative, you'd expect the odd one to pop up.

Fair enough observation, but how does that help authenticate the book's claims about its authorship?

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23 minutes ago, Habitat said:

Not a single one ? For something as lengthy as that, that seems incredible. Maybe Will has a different thought on that. I mean, even if  someone made a hundred guesses that were all entirely speculative, you'd expect the odd one to pop up.

What does it matter?

It's claim is to be a revelation, it's not. It doesn't reveal or make any predictions that were unknown at the time. Then became known afterwards. 

Even if it did get one correct, it doesn't matter. For it to be a revelation it needs to get everything single thing correct. 

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15 minutes ago, eight bits said:

@Habitat

Fair enough observation, but how does that help authenticate the book's claims about its authorship?

Well, It does not help the idea that it was channelled from space "wise guys". Surely such beings would know things we were ignorant of at the time, and we would have stumbled upon in the interim. What do they say about human knowledge doubling every x number of years. I am actually amazed if there in nothing in that tome that looks like an accurate forecast or reference to something that came into the sphere of knowledge later, that was not dreamt up at the time, even a duffer would have come up with something !

Edited by Habitat
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4 minutes ago, danydandan said:

What does it matter?

It's claim is to be a revelation, it's not. It doesn't reveal or make any predictions that were unknown at the time. Then became known afterwards. 

Even if it did get one correct, it doesn't matter. For it to be a revelation it needs to get everything single thing correct. 

If you throw a very large number of darts, some are going to hit the target by chance, even if wearing a blindfold. 

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4 minutes ago, danydandan said:

What does it matter?

(With thanks to @Habitat for the reply)

Hoaxing is an underappreciated art form. The good hoax has to be plausible enough to draw people in, but not so good that nobody ever appreciates the accomplishment. That may nor may not involve the hoax-meister being personally recognized (there is, as far as I know, no "Hoaxers Hall of Fame"), but the appreciation of artistry is what distiguishes hoax from fraud. The hoaxer wants to be caught, but not immediately.

Recall "Christians against Dinosaurs." They deliberately promoted the dead-mouse-on-the-kitchen-floor proof of their hoaxery: a photoshopped picture of a public demonstration ostensibly denouncing dinosaurs. Apparently, the really hip crowd caught the fake right away, one of the demonstrators' placards had some logo that made some "insider reference" (not being hip myself, I can't say that I ever got the reference, even after it was pointed out to me). More patient debunkers found the original picture (but then for whatever reason decided not to say where they found it - leading to a round of which picture was 'shopped?). Finally, somebody did the long slog and sourced the thing, with supporting documentation that the demonstration in the picture actually happened, with the people in the picture actually onsite.

So why did the hoaxers do that? Except for that one thing (and eventually, long afterwards, a confession from the most public face of the hoax), everything else was circumstantial. "Explanations" were offered when lesser pieces of evidence surfaced (e.g. what else was on the photobucket of another public face of the hoax - dude just didn't understand which of his pix were public; no hacking, just asking for what was in plain sight).

I think the hoaxers wanted to make fools of the believers. If somebody believes a "perfect" hoax, then they're just fraud victims. Nothing funny about that. But if "they should have known," then they're dupes - and that's a riot. Even if the dupes never know your name, you still got your jollies.

Not saying that UB is a hoax, as opposed to a fraud, or an innocently mistaken profession of faith, but you did ask why something odd might matter.

 

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52 minutes ago, Habitat said:

Not a single one ? For something as lengthy as that, that seems incredible. Maybe Will has a different thought on that. I mean, even if  someone made a hundred guesses that were all entirely speculative, you'd expect the odd one to pop up.

The closest I know of is it seemed to back the new idea if migratory genes in humans which I believe turned out to be substantiated. The book claims that to be a scientific prediction, not sure if that's the sort of thing you mean. 

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1 minute ago, psyche101 said:

The closest I know of is it seemed to back the new idea if migratory genes in humans which I believe turned out to be substantiated. The book claims that to be a scientific prediction, not sure if that's the sort of thing you mean. 

Well yes, of course. Not that I am au fait with that subject.

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8 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

Forgive me please for doing a will, but this is a link to their claims:

http://urantia-book.org/archive/science/ginsss2.htm

Which I straight away see is incorrect

  • Predictions that disagreed with Science in 1935:
  • A.  Predictions that now agree with science:
    • 1. Healing chemicals for wounds.
    • 2. Plate tectonics or continental drift.

 



Wegner's theory was published in 1912.   Significantly, the UB makes no reference to modern plate tectonics .....

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1 minute ago, Essan said:

Which I straight away see is incorrect
 



Wegner's theory was published in 1912.   Significantly, the UB makes no reference to modern plate tectonics .....

I honestly don't think that's going to be the only one.... :lol:

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