A RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ISSUE - HEART AND SOUL
-by Rosey Lieske

The risk of living in a country which guarantees religious freedom, is that we may assume it's already ours -- that we'll never be put in a position where it must be fought for, or reestablished. We are free ... are we not? Our First Amendment states clearly: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Yet here we are in a situation where the Urantia Foundation has somehow found a means of asserting legal control over a Revelation that was given to the entire world. As proof, they have in their possession a writ issued to them by the Library of Congress--a "copyright".

How did Congress, or its Library, get into the picture? Is The Urantia Book not a thing of God's, under the realm of religion -- in fact a religious revelation? How did Congress unwittingly become party to the prohibition and control of our religion beliefs?

The First Amendment is the issue at the heart of Kristen's case -- and the reason why the outcome of this litigation matters to us all. This case of a lone woman and her family, willing to shoulder the burden of representing the fact of our book's transcendent origins and purpose, vividly shows us that principles, like those of religious freedom, are never established once and then assumed to be ours forever. Rather, the process of law is an evolutionary and ongoing thing. Principles must be tirelessly established again and again, through thousands of cases. The more principle-focused the case, the more profound the impact of its decision upon all of us.

By involving the Library of Congress in issuing them a copyright the Foundation has purposely negated and ignored the transcendent origins of the book. A legal copyright must establish a point of human origin for any book--as the powers of our government purposely extend to secular (or human) concerns alone. Once we move beyond matters which are of human origin among us, to things of non-human, superhuman or divine origin, we find the presence of U.S. law regarding them significantly absent. Purposely absent. This is tacit evidence of a system configured to separate church and state. Things beyond the parameters of "external" reality (outside the physical person, possession, or property of human beings) are simply not attachable by U.S. law. The inner realm of our own personal philosophy and religious life, as well as things deemed to be from God, are all left to be governed between ourselves and our Creator.

The Foundation has followed a rocky and twisted path in its attempts to prove human copyrightable authorship. Their arguments have been variable and mercuric since the beginning, and have fallen of their own shaky logic, under the scrutiny of basic copyright law.
 

The Foundation's Varied Claims of Human Authorship

The Foundation's original copyright claim was based upon Dr. Sadler's patient (the contact personality) having authored The Urantia Book. Their ownership supposedly flowed from the patient's oral transfer of copyright to the Foundation (a previous case established that they had no written assignment of rights). Beyond negating the entire idea that the Urantia Book is a revelation by spiritual beings, their claim that the patient authored the book ran into additional difficulties when it came time to renew in 1983. The renewal provisions of the copyright act require that the author be alive at the time a renewal is issued. A previous lawsuit had already established that the patient was no longer living.

Since he was deceased, only the subject's wife or heirs had any legal right to renew. To do so, they were required to file before the 1983 expiration of the original term, which of course they did not. This caused The Urantia Book, as a matter of law, to lapse into the public domain in that year.

The Foundation has now expediently abandoned the position that Dr. Sadler's patient wrote the book, pinning their claim instead on the contact commission as the basis of their copyright. Urantia Foundation lawyers asserted, through intense legal tangling, that it was the contact commission who provided the motivating factor in the creation of the Urantia Book, and at their "instance and expense" the Papers were created. By convoluted legal arguments, they sought to establish that somehow a group of celestial beings, interested in writing, came under the lucky influence of some resourceful human beings wanting serious questions answered for a book they were putting together.

If the contact commission had indeed directed, financed and inspired the Celestial authors, the Urantia Papers might legally be considered a "work for hire' and "compiled work" -- a compendium of information, like an encyclopedia, in which a number of writers submit articles requested by an employer, who then owns all rights to the book itself. So, the Foundation's attorneys argue that the contact commission did the work of submitting the vital questions and directives to their invisible "employees', and then compiled, revised and expanded the responses into a manuscript. This "manuscript', they argue, was then given to the Foundation at the time of its formation some twenty years later. Aside from the fact that there was no "manuscript' given the Foundation, but a set of printing plates, this argument flies in the face of all the submitted evidence -- even against much of their own.
 

The Significance of The Urantia Book's Origins in Court

Kristen's attorney, Joe Lewis' response and the Fellowship's amicus brief both fully addressed the secondary role of the contact commission. But in Joe's reply, the Foundation's ultimate nemesis in attempting to assert and maintain human control over this strange and beautiful book is then discussed on pages 28-34: Under U.S. law, you have to be a human author to claim copyright protection. These authors were superhuman beings. The Urantia Book, even though being a "literary work" embodied in book form and full of recognizable English words, is simply not copyrightable.

So far, in a case which has been limited solely to determining whether or not the Foundation's copyright is valid, the real implications of its celestial authorship have remained only marginally addressed. But nowhere in this process has any invention, any fiction of human authorship or ownership, been able to take root and supersede the essential fact of The Urantia Paper's superhuman origin. Nor has the Foundation, willing to compromise the future viability of our book for the sake of their own self-empowerment, been able to remain a potent contender for ownership of our Revelation.

At every step, their claims of human authorship have been effectively challenged -- at every step, the transcendent origins of the revelation have come more to the fore: appropriately neither sanctioned by law, nor trampled by it. We do live with certain innate protections here. If pursued and pursued, up to the Supreme Court level, the extraneous factors clouding the Foundation's essential violation along the lines of religious freedom will become stripped away -- revealing a First Amendment case, heart and soul. Human authorship alone would have resulted in a purely secular case.

The outcome of this case will establish whether we were willing enough to successfully fight for our own religious freedoms, on the present-day battleground of lawyers and courts -- as soldiers armed with checkbooks instead of swords. A war of attrition, a wearing away of your enemies' resources, is still just such a battlefield. Will we defend our book's transcendent origins well enough, so that it may finally be declared celestial in origin, a religious matter, and subsequently well outside the parameters of secular law? Or will we fail the "test of time" and let them win? The fight for religious freedom is ongoing-and it belongs to us all.
 

(This article was written a year ago -- and we all know how it came out. A result, I think, of the inability of modern lawyers and judges to countenance the idea that Revelation could occur in book form. Hardly a problem restricted to them. The case against Kristen and Eric, regarding the emblem in Colorado, has been dropped while final decisions regarding damages have yet to be rendered in the Arizona (copyright) case.

Either way, Kristen and Eric have shouldered an enormous burden on every level to represent the higher and deeper truth about our book in this situation. Either way they stand enormously in debt where an enormous debt is due THEM. Please help any way you can. Send donations directly to them.)

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Kristen Maaherra and Eric Schaveland