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Book, I'm one hundred percent sure we would finish up doing what they have done. That is, we would use the best available current concepts (1930's concepts for the revelators) that permit us to reveal, with minimal distortion, whatever it is we were commissioned to reveal. And we would be forced to accept the absolute inevitability that in a book as extensive and detailed as The Urantia Book, the inclusion of error would be unavoidable.
Try it and see for yourself. Bill Sadler used an analogy about explaining the workings of the New York stock exchange to a group of Bantu warriors--with nothing you say being interpretable by them as fibs, lies, falsehood, deceit, or being misleading! What a task!
Why is it that the laws of revelation should be so weighted against the revelators revealing anything?
The clue might be found in what the book says about our free will:
"No other being, force, creator, or agency in all the wide universe of universes can interfere to any degree with the absolute sovereignty of the mortal free will, as it operates within the realms of choice, regarding the eternal destiny of the personality of the choosing mortal. As pertains to eternal survival, God has decreed the sovereignty of the material and mortal will, and that decree is absolute." (71)
There are several similar statements about the absolute sovereignty of human free will. So what is free will?
The Urantia Book tells us that our universe careers will finally be rewarded by our attaining of the presence of the Universal Father and then being ushered into the Corps of Finality--provided we make a freewill decision of total commitment to the "doing of God's will."
Alternatively, if we finally reject making the commitment to doing God's will, we will become as if we had never been. (37)
How does this situation measure up against the reward and punishment methodology that we commonly use to train animals and even our offspring? Is there a real difference?
Let's consider the animal situation. As an example, we'll use a horse that habitually tries to bite anyone either grooming it or trying to place a saddle upon its back. We take the horse to a professional trainer and watch to see what happens. This one starts by grooming the animal, at the same time keeping a keen professional eye on the animal's head. By instinct almost, this trainer knows when the horse is going to try to bite him--and he is ready for it. Even before the horse's teeth touch his arm, he has given it a sharp tap on the nose, and instantly resumed the grooming as if nothing had happened. A couple of sessions of instantaneous punishment or reward like this, and the horse gives up biting, at least until it inadvertently discovers that a new rider or groom is not familiar with the game.
Used correctly and intelligently, this reward and punishment scenario can achieve marvels with both animals and children, even with adults. How is our entry to or rejection from the Corps of Finality any different? Are we not given a choice between two alternatives, one of which offers a reward while the other brings a punishment? And in this case, the reward and the punishment are extreme, the reward being life, the punishment, a death sentence.
Although not immediately evident, there may be a subtle difference between a true freewill choosing to do the will of God and a choice that is made between alternatives that have the reward or punishment feedback incentive .
What if we decide that we will always seek to do the will of God totally unconditionally--that is, totally independently of whether there is a desirable reward for making the commitment or some form of punishment if we do not?
Surely this totally unconditional commitment can only be made if we have attained a state of mind whereby the doing the will of God becomes natural to us regardless of the need for reward.
And because it is made completely independently of either the hope of reward or the threat of punishment, would that not be an authentic freewill decision ?
Now comes the crunch. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me that uncertainty is an essential component of any environment in which authentic freewill decisions can find expression.
To start with, for a free will decision to be made, events cannot be predetermined. The Urantia Book cites a number of conditions that introduce varying degrees of unpredictability into whatever will be. And now modern physics has supplied clear-cut empirical evidence that we do not live in a clockwork universe but one in which probability, that is uncertainty, is the norm.
Besides the clockwork universe concept, now thoroughly discredited, there is another kind of "certainty complex" that can run our lives and take away from our making of free will decisions. This was illustrated for me by a friend who had the task of training air traffic controllers in an Islamic country.
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