Urantia Book movie?

Riktare wrote:

Hi Coop, could you add a link to the film clip? (I just see an ugly placeholder for the Flash plugin and don't want to download that on this PC)

When I click on the first video, I get a message that "this video does not exist".

Quote:

There have been quite a few unsanctioned films about Jesus and none of them seemed to have caused too serious an uproar. Witness Mel Gibson's production.

You will note that the reason why Mel Gibson's film was supported by the Church was because it followed the NT very closely, and, when it departed from the text at all, it did so in a manner that was entirely "orthodox", if you will. It broke no new ground whatsoever. It was very much like "King of Kings" or "Ben Hur" in that respect.

Quote:

But even outside of any story of Jesus, the human history and cosmology of the UB are perfectly poised to give today's science fiction and historical adventure films a hyper-boost in material, moral thinking and imagination. I don't think it will be long before smart, in-the-know and creative producers start to pick up on UB themes. In some sense, Star Trek and Star Wars are bastardizations of certain concepts fostered in the revelation even if they aren't directly lifted from there.

I am inclined to disagree with you regarding the idea that Star Trek and Star Wars are "bastardisations of certain concepts fostered in the revelation". There is absolutely no reason to assume that either Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas had even heard of the UB, let alone read it. Gene Roddenberry was a humanist, and who knows what George Lucas was.

i think the claim, or even suggestion, that either or both men had read part or all of the book is more the product of wishful thinking than anything else. I am not saying this to denigrate the book in any way. I merely don't think that it should be given credit for franchises (film and television) that it had nothing to do with creating.

Now, could the cosmology of the UB be made into an interesting film for sci-fi purposes? Yes, I expect it could. After all, we won't KNOW for certain whether the cosmology of the book is true until we die. So until we are gone to glory, what we read in the book must be taken with a certain amount of Faith, as must any religious or quasi-religious book.

Is the human history of the book accurate? Well, that is a very good question, isn't it? Obviously, we have no PROOF that Adam and Eve existed, or that the Lucifer Rebellion took place, or that Andon and Fonta were the first persons, and so-forth. It might make a heck of an interesting story for film, but i don't think you could market it as a documentary. At most, you could market it as speculative fiction, historical and sci-fi.

The benefit to speculative fiction is that you are proposing something that has the strong possibility, at least, of being true in the present, past, or future. In other words, its not manifold BS just designed for entertainment, but is in fact intended to educate, at least to a point.

I mean, in the 1960's, Captain Kirk whipped out a hand-held communications device to contact the ship or other people for information or to issue orders, or for beam-up. Now we have Smart Phones that will do everything that Kirk's communicator would do, at last terrestrially speaking (the only reason it won't do Earth to orbit communication is two fold; one, we haven't needed it yet, and two, we would not be able to use standard telephony at that point.

At present, i must end. I look forward to hearing your responses.

Urantia Book Forum

Who is online