This is so true. Usually my first judgments about books after reading a few pages are dead-on, but I was proven horribly wrong in the case of judging The Urantia Book from just a few pages, or "facts" about it.
There is no part of it that I could've accepted any sooner than when the whole thing came to me. If I had read this book a year or two earlier, it would've been pearls before swine. It's like everything in my life built up to the moment I started to read and think about it. Like the rest of my early life was just endurance training, and now I'm starting to really live. The Urantia Book is in a class of its own.
Superficial critics really are satisfied with giving it only a surface-level reading of maybe a few pages, and then finding some reason to dismiss it completely without full investigation. If they investigated it more fully, they would realize the fact that a sacred text has existed for this long, commands the respect of hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people, and has not started a cult, or even inspired a cult leader to come in, grab the reigns, and rule. It's because, I'm convinced, that no cult leader, no matter how bright, could use these teachings to mislead people for very long. Therefore the papers have been ignored as insignificant.
The "rational skeptics" ignore TUB because reading the whole thing to actually offer real, fair criticism of it doesn't seem worth the effort to them, they are so self-assured in their disbelief in God, and their belief in the failures of religion, that they will feel justified simply ignoring it as "another crazy religious text."
Cult leaders won't use it because it's so long and complex that it would take a highly highly intelligent cult leader to actually deceive people with it. Plus, the religion of Jesus is about the individual and God, meaning people can worship everywhere with everyone without having to be centrally organized by a church dictatorship. If I wanted control over others the way cult leaders do, the first thing I would do is make sure that a copy of The Urantia Book never gets near any of those people.
But even theists, not just atheists, are happy to dismiss it as just the incoherent ramblings of just another mystery cult. If only they knew what they were missing.
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