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Introduction
Have you ever realised that your God is too small? Think on this. Dotted over the night sky at a distance of about 8 billion light-years or more, are curious objects called quasars. They appear to be associated with colliding galaxies or colliding black holes. A single quasar may shine with the blinding light of 10 thousand billion ordinary suns. What on earth can they really be? What unimaginable event does such a release of energy herald?
This work discusses error and prophecy in the Urantia Papers. Its purpose is to put them in their right place. If the revelators used them, they must have had good reason. What could it be? Well certainly to prevent us from messing up their true purposes. Perhaps there could be no other.
If you find yourself unable to cope with a few harmless errors--included with a revelation for the purpose of diverting you from sabotaging its real purpose--then your God is certainly by far too small. Ask yourself did the material that bothers you have any conceivable spiritual value? If not then it was doomed to die with your brain--which may be indicative of its real importance.
"Only those human experiences of spiritual value survive--your past life and its memories, having neither spiritual meaning nor eternity value, will perish with the human brain."
Your spirituality is the measure of your nearness to God. And so surely the true purpose of the revelators in giving us the Urantia Papers would have been to increase our spirituality. That means increasing our love for God and for one another.
For nigh on thirty years or more after publication of the Papers almost all its readers believed firmly in their infallibility. Many still cling to this belief, regardless of how convincing the contrary evidence may be. One conspicuous thing among those early readers that persists to this day, is that, as a group and in terms of their spirituality, they do not stand out from the average church-going Christian.
So why did we need a 2000 page revelation? To make us better scientists, accurate historians, accomplished theologians? Is that what Jesus did? If we go to the conversations between Jesus and Immanuel just prior to Jesus' incarnation, we find Immanuel saying: (P.1328)
"Your great mission…to live a life wholeheartedly motivated to do the will of your Paradise Father, thus to reveal God, your Father, in the flesh and especially to the creatures of the flesh….the achievement of God seeking man and finding him and the phenomenon of man seeking God and finding him… Exhibit in your one short life in the flesh, as it has never before been seen…, the transcendent possibilities attainable by a God-knowing human during the short career of mortal existence."
This presentation is in two parts--the first gives a short introduction to historical aspects of how these Papers came about then covers some of the prophetic material. The second part is about the error component.
For the first thirty years of its shelf life prophecy, or error in The Urantia Book was not an issue. But then a handful of readers began to ask questions. Prior to this time both types of material were in the exclusive possession of 'the experts.' But then the effects of the knowledge explosion began to leak to the general public arena. Parallel with this, and due to extraordinary technological advances, was an explosion in the accuracy by which measurements could be made. The results are twofold--sheer wonderment for some of the prophetic knowledge contained in the Papers and sheer puzzlement about the error content that suddenly became exposed.
Items that produce true wonderment if read and digested thoroughly are those covering the discovery of the radii of the electron and proton, another being confirmation that the neutrino exists and truly is released in vast quantities during the explosion phase of neutron star formation. For anybody with a trenchancy for appraising probabilities, the careful study of these cases to assess the chances of correctly guessing the answers is likely to induce the feeling that, at the time of writing, no human author had the knowledge to do so.
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