The Shame of the Foundation, Part One
     or
The Declaration of Good Intentions
     or
Fear and Loathing in the Urantia Movement
by Norm Du Val
 

THE SCENE: 533 Diversey Parkway, Chicago, circa 1966.

Christy, a couple of the folks and I have been thinking, - we should make a few minor changes in the text of the book before the second printing goes out. Say what? Oh yes, of course we know what the "Declaration of Good Intentions" says about keeping the text inviolate, but these would just be very small changes, no one will even notice in such a large book, and besides, who's gonna tell? And you know, we're the administrators of this revelation to the planet, we've been assigned by God to be in charge of it. It's really no one's business what we do, and no one will notice. Anyway, changes this small in a book this large, percentage wise, is no change at all really. For all practical purposes, the text will still be the same.

We thought we should change this word right here on page 460. Yeah, that's right, the word "sixty", as in sixty thousand. It seems rather high, rather too large a number don't you think? Sixty thousand times as dense, can you imagine? We thought the word "forty" might be better there. We reasoned that it will be easier for people to understand if it's forty thousand rather than sixty thousand. The Revelators probably meant forty thousand in the first place. But no problem, everyone makes mistakes, even angels, HA. If we can't fix a few of their mistakes here and there, what good are we? Of course we could just leave it as it is and footnote it, but you know, footnoting is a can of worms all by itself and exposes the fact that changes have been made at all. It's best if people don't know that when they buy the book.

Also, here on page 478, we think that the word "instantaneous" should be changed to "almost instantaneous", or wait, I know, how about "well-nigh instantaneous?" That has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? What's that? What's wrong with instantaneous? Well Christy, think about it. You know NOTHING can really be instantaneous. It's just an expression. Everything takes some time, however small, right? This will make the book more accurate, more real, and certainly easier for everyone to understand, under the circumstances. We all love the text of the book the way it is too, but hey, if we can improve it, let's do it.

Oh, and most important is this change. I think we should delete the words "in the manger" from the middle of page 1317. Think about it Christy, Jesus couldn't possibly have been in the manger at that time, nor could the three wise men have visited him in the manger. How would everyone have fit in a little manger? Why, it's ridiculous. Better to just leave those three words out and say no more about it.

You know, we've gone through 10,000 books so far. In 30 years or so there could be a quarter million books out there. If we don't catch these errors now, soon there may be 250,000 Urantia Books in the world with all the errors that are in this first printing. No one wants that. But if we correct the errors now, in 30 years the number of books with the first printing errors will only be 4 % of the total, and of course that means that the our corrected versions will make up 96% of the total.

What's that you say? What will the readers say? Who knows? Who cares? I don't think they'll even notice, to tell you the truth. But if they do, we just won't say anything. We don't have to answer to them. We have the copyright. If anyone does make a stink, it'll probably just be radical types anyway. We don't have to explain or defend our position. There's always the moderates who'll do that for us. They'll muddy the water. The moderates will suggest that those who are critical of us and our secret methods and changes to the book are fanatics, extremists, people with a TEXT FETISH. They'll say that the changes were made by those who were directly responsible for the text, as if that somehow negates the Declaration's intentions to keep the text "inviolate." They'll talk about love and brotherhood, and about "getting with the program". They'll say, "What's done is done. Forget it and move on." Then we can continue doing what we're doing. The moderates are great for that, they don't like confrontations or taking sides. To a moderate, our small text changes won't seem like a big deal at all. Even though we've pledged to keep the text inviolate in our Declaration of Good Intentions, the moderates will just figure that gee whiz, you have to expect some corrections. They'll say we probably did the best we could, the Declaration is just a guide anyway, nobody's perfect, etc. That's the way moderates are.

What's that? Footnote the changes? Oh geez Christy, do you know how tacky that would look?

OK, so we're go for the changes? Great? There's no point in letting these errors continue on in future printings if we can stop them now. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In thirty years the readers will look back and thank us for this. Oh by the way, there's another error I wanted to discuss with you. It's on page 1363. Here it is, "the Jordan valley and, far beyond, the rocky...." Yeah, don't you think it would sound better if we took out those two commas and added the word lay?....