1\23\96
Dear Carolyn;
Thank you for including me in your mailing of January 18, 1996 which included a copy of your paper entitled, "The Plan for The Urantia Book Revelation." This paper reiterates much of the content of the letter sent out by First Society in April of 1995. I read that letter and saw it simply as an expression of a majority opinion of First Society members -- an expression of belief, hopes and ideals which I took into consideration as we debated the issues in the General Council. (Am I correct in my recollection that First Society was the first readership group to vote to dissociate from Urantia Foundation back when the rift was first opening?)
Your letter provides an expansion of the ideas contained in the First Society Letter. Both of these letters have the appearance of being collections of anecdotes, scraps of writing, partial documents and personal memories which provide a rationale for holding particular beliefs. In my opinion they do not provide the kind of clear analysis of factors comprising the present situation which would help in the formulation of practical solutions. Neither do they include a consideration of some of the most significant matters which have led to the decision to publish.
I believe that many items in your documentation are factually questionable. I wish to emphasize that, charming as many of these old stories might be, many of them are indeed in the category of "myth and legend" in popular readership culture and bear only a partial or questionable correspondence to reality. As these legends continue to be embellished with supernatural enhancements such as stories about Seraphic trains over Lake Michigan or visits by Contact Commissioners to one of the Mansion worlds, you can observe the very process taking place which I believe the Revelators had hoped to avoid -- the emergence of a religion about The Urantia Book and the emergence of reader cults who base their identities on imagined roles in these stories.
While this apocryphal material may provide grist for speculative compilations such as Mark Kulieke's "The Birth of a Revelation," this mythological quicksand is so seriously lacking in historical veracity that I believe it is incapable of providing a viable foundation upon which responsible decision making and policy implementation might be made.
If the requested vows of secrecy and instructions to destroy certain communications were indeed made by the Revelators, any "Plan for The Urantia Book Revelation" was early undermined by numerous individuals who obviously placed their own personal agendas above these instructions so clearly given. Perhaps the revelators were well aware of the danger of such material becoming a basis for decision making at some point in the future when the nature of the situation would require careful assessment and collaboration amongst experienced readers rather than reliance upon "myths and legends."
It appears to me that you are asking The Fellowship to base policy and decision making on information which the Revelators clearly did not want to survive publication. This view is supported in your own documentation.
But the statement which I view as perhaps the greatest misrepresentation of reality is the comment, "If the Fellowship publishes, any hope of reconciliation with readers sympathetic to the Foundation would vanish and the schism will continue indefinitely." As has been pointed out elsewhere, the social and religious repercussions of Fellowship publication will be the result of numerous choices yet to be made by a great variety of mortals, each of whom is endowed with free will. The fact of publication is not a deterministic metaphysical event which has the power to predetermine the choices of these countless individuals and force a particular outcome.
Let me review that which you have presented to us as "clear and incontrovertible facts."
1.) "The Angels of the Churches, the Angels of Progress, the Midwayer Commission, and the Planetary Prince have the ultimate authority for the welfare of The Urantia Book."
This statement is not really supported in your documentation and I have no basis for accepting it as true. On the contrary, your documentation indicates that "the overall welfare and direction" of The Urantia Book is placed in the hands of the Seraphim of Progress and that the "immediate fostering of the Urantia revelation" is entrusted to the Seraphim of the Churches." It also notes that after February 11, 1954, in the absence of Midwayer intervention, the Foundation Trustees are on their own. Again, by your own documentation, the Planetary Prince appears to have relinquished control to the discretion of Foundation Trustees as of January 1, 1955. This is far from a clear statement about any "ultimate authority." I know of no documentation for any subsequent intervention although I am aware that numerous individuals down to the present day have claimed to be receiving messages from Melchizedek and other assorted personages.
2.) "The chain of authority for management of The Urantia Book was first placed into the hands of the human contact commissioners by the Revelatory Commission, then delegated to the trustees of Urantia Foundation by the invisible Planetary Prince. According to their Declaration of Trust, the trustees assumed exclusive responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the text and the publication of all editions, including translations."
To begin with, this is a very confusing statement. Three of the human contact commissioners were the trustees of Urantia Foundation at the time this alleged transaction occurred. There is nothing in your documentation to support the allegation that the Planetary Prince "delegated" authority to the trustees of Urantia Foundation. Your documentation indicates that he simply relinquished custody of the book to the trustees with further action being left to their personal judgement. Read your own documentation carefully. This relinquishing of custody is not the same as delegating authority.
Your "chain of authority" prevailed only up until January 1, 1955 at which time the Trustees were essentially on their own (remembering that the Trustees were not a completely separate group from the Contact Commission.) At that point in time, your "chain of authority" was severed by the silence of the Revelators. Your claims to continuing contact, i.e., checking out corrections with the Revelators, is end noted as hearsay. There is no evidence I know of which could be used to collaborate your claims. If you are referring to statements in the "Declaration of Trust," see my comment to your item number 6 below.
Given The Urantia Book's extensive development of the way in which Supremacy evolves, the idea that any human institution would have been made a proxy for Celestial authority begins to sound rather foolish. Such an action does not appear likely within the framework of the cosmology developed in the text of The Urantia Book. Neither do I find it reasonable to think that the Revelators would have attempted to launch such an institutional craft into seas which they knew would be characterized by "economic upheavals, moral crosscurrents, sociologic rip tides and cyclonic transitions." This statement number 2 is certainly not a "clear and incontrovertible fact."
I believe the truth of the matter is most clearly presented in your second sentence where you note that, ". . . the trustees assumed exclusive responsibility . . ."
3.) "There was supposed to be a copyright in and to The Urantia Book."
I read through your supportive documentation many times and could find no justification for this statement. Your only reference to this is end noted as hearsay. The "message" you quote at the bottom of page five refers to copyright but is far from being a mandate. Certainly the Revelators knew the ins and outs of international copyright law. If they had been so concerned about copyright, it seems they would have advised securing a copyright in Great Britain which I understand, at the time, had a more liberal copyright law and would have granted a copyright in a work authored by superhuman beings. By extension of international law, this protection would eventually have become worldwide. But no such advice appears to have been given.
In a tape-recorded conversation, Bill Sadler Jr. makes the following comments about copyright: "We got the copyright because someone had to get it, and it was not easy. For example, in Canada they requested the name of the "author" and we could not come up with one, so it was copyrighted under "anthologies." If we ever had to go to court, we could not get damages because there just is not a human author." In this conversation, Bill goes on to imply that the main reason for getting a copyright was to get a Library of Congress Catalogue number (this was prior to the use of the ISBN system.)
In short, Carolyn, I find nothing which would lead me to accept the statement, "There was supposed to be a copyright in and to The Urantia Book" as a "clear and incontrovertible fact."
4.) "The Revelators directed the contact commissioners to protect the name, "Urantia." This responsibility was passed on to the Foundation by the contact commissioners."
You document the first part of this statement with a communication which was received in 1945. At that time this protection of the name was said to be necessary "for one generation." This is hardly a justification for policy a half century later. This statement reflects something which is pervasive throughout your document and that is a failure to distinguish between actions of the Revelators and purely human decisions made by the Contact Commissioners. You seem to imbue all decisions and actions taken by Contact Commissioners as having the same weight as statements made by the Revelators. The fact that two of the Contact Commissioners collaborated with attorneys at Northern Trust Company in Chicago to draft the "Declaration of Trust" does not prove that this secondary document was an instrument conceived and utilized by the Revelators as a mechanism for the transference of "authority." I could find nothing in your documentation which would justify the assumption that any "responsibility" was ever bestowed upon the Foundation by the Revelators, nor is there anything to indicate that the establishment of certain responsibilities for the Foundation by the commissioners was anything other than the human effort of these commissioners acting "in accordance with their own judgement." Again, I don't feel that you are really providing us with "clear and incontrovertible fact."
5.) "The Revelators advised that there should be only one official "Urantia" social outreach organization -- democratic, but minimally organized -- to occupy the field."
I found no documentation for this statement in your writing. The closest I could come is the writing on page six which you say was "adapted from written communications." But what parts were adapted and what parts represent editorial comments? What was the motive for its presentation -- were comments from the Revelators taken out of context and used to support the organizational ideals of the contact commissioners? Was it simply a response to the "Sherman rebellion?" The oft-repeated statement about minimal organization and organizing just to "occupy the field" is at clear odds with Midwayer comments in the text itself which praise Paul's efforts at organization. It is not likely to have come from the same source which called for "thousands of study groups" or multiple translations -- such an undertaking would require an organization far more dynamic than one which was content to merely "occupy the field." Attempting to merely "occupy the field" in an environment which would be characterized by "cyclonic transitions" does not strike me as a formula for long and robust institutional life. The inconsistencies here are such that I can't see these apocryphal comments as anything more than an expression of the organizational ideals of the Contact Commissioners given their limited insight into the nature of the transformations to which we have borne witness during the last half of the twentieth century. This "fact" number five is indeed far from being a "clear and incontrovertible fact."
6.) "Although the trustees planned and launched the Brotherhood, the revelators advised that the two organizations -- the publishing and the social -- be organically disconnected from each other. Under this plan, each would carry out its mission without interference from, or accountability to, the other."
Your "evidence" for this statement is end noted as "personal memory" based on a conversation with Christy. This statement of yours seems to be in contradiction to comments attributed to Bill Sadler Jr. on page nine of your writing regarding the avoidance of friction "when an autocratic body functionally cooperates with a democratic body." "Functional cooperation" does not, in my mind, imply "each carrying out its mission without interference from, or accountability to, the other." If this "fact" number six is true, then it becomes obvious that the "Plan for The Urantia Book Revelation" began to seriously unravel the day on which section 3.4 of the "Declaration of Trust" was drafted (reproduced as a note at the end of this letter). If your "fact" number six is indeed a "clear and incontrovertible fact," it proves beyond a doubt that the "Declaration of Trust" was of human origin. It would be impossible for an organization to undertake the mission implied in section 3.4 of the "Declaration" and remain organically disconnected from the social repercussions.
Being unable to see your "clear and incontrovertible facts" as such, it becomes very difficult to accept your conclusions. Even if I were to accept your "facts," I fail to see how your conclusions follow logically from them. Even your conclusions lack discrimination between what might be legitimate messages from the Revelators and their adaptation by contact commissioners to the solution of problems unique to their particular time and situation. For example, your conclusion number three -- "The Revelators warned about confusion inherent in having too many Urantia organizations" -- is not supported by a copy of a written message but rather as a written memorandum for the Executive Committee "adapted" by Bill Sadler Jr. Again, we are far from establishing a "clear and incontrovertible fact."
What I am willing to present as fact in this matter is that distrust and dissatisfaction with Urantia Foundation is so widespread amongst the readership that it is extremely likely that someone else will print if The Fellowship fails to do so -- and there are groups and individuals with the resources to do so successfully.
The real issue is no longer whether The Fellowship should publish or defer to Foundation requests. The real issue is whether The Fellowship will publish -- and publish soon -- or whether The Fellowship will abdicate this option and thus clear the stage for independent publication by one or more third parties.
Current world-wide interest in The Urantia Book is far greater than you might imagine. One reader-established Urantia Book information service that I know of in North America is currently receiving between 500 and 800 inquiries per day! This is up from an average of 300 inquiries per day over the past six months.
What we older readers consider to be the official organizations -- the Foundation and The Fellowship -- are rapidly marginalizing themselves by remaining embroiled in internal dispute. Neither the Foundation nor The Fellowship are functioning any longer at the growing edge of readership activities.
We are witnessing the birth of a new day in the affairs of the revelation and if we are going to remain capable of making a positive contribution it is absolutely essential that we start doing something besides trying to figure out ways of keeping the blood flowing in our rapidly coagulating umbilical cord.
If we continue to mire ourselves down with the apocryphal baggage with which much of this generation of readers seems to be enamored, we are likely to find a new generation of readers emerging who have grown up free from such encumbrances and who are able to develop reader institutions with a much higher degree of vitality and vision than anything we've so far been able to provide. I would be very surprised to find that The Foundation and The Fellowship were the only reader organizations being fostered by our unseen friends -- read The Urantia Book -- these folks never put all their eggs in one basket.
***Leadership will be the privilege of that organization which most effectively serves.****
I would invite all of us to consider very carefully a comment which you attribute to "certain wise comments and advices" which says, "Our troubles will be greatly lessened if we avoid all discussion of the origin of the book."
Thank you once again for presenting your thoughts and soliciting the expression of differing ideas on these matters. If you feel that I am missing something important in my reasoning or seriously misinterpreting your documentation, I trust you will clarify the matter. I appreciate the fact that you faithfully continue to work for The Fellowship even though you apparently hold a minority viewpoint.
Sincerely,
(signed)
David Kantor
Notes: Section 3.4 from the
"Declaration of Trust"
3.4 DISSEMINATION OF TEACHINGS OF THE URANTIA BOOK: It shall be the duty of
the Trustees to disseminate the teachings and doctrines of The Urantia Book
and to devise, to develop, and to effectuate means and methods for such
dissemination, and to apply and use the Trust Estate for the accomplishment of
that end.