On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Muriel Hykes wrote:

> >Try reading the Urantia Book
>         NO, NO!  My weird brother had one of those in college, before he got
> SAVED, Halleuia!  It has never happened before or after, but when I touched
> that book, I got an awful sick feeling of evil from it.  Don't even mess
> with it.  OTOH, when I hear things that are true, I get a tingle on top my
> head.  ( I still haven't figured out the arm tingle code. ;-) )

The UB is, and will remain, a great enigma.  I've read the thing
and find it to be a work of surpassing spiritual beauty, but I'm
in no position to judge its authenticity.  I can't discern
anything evil about it.

Returning to matters at least tangentially relevant to this list,
the UB is one of the few allegedly "revealed" writings that has
something interesting to say about evolution, with implications
concerning diet.  I am the last person to be evangelizing this
book, but for anyone who can suspend disbelief, it gives quite an
unusual blend of cosmology, theology, and anthropology.

There are many ways to fit evolution into a theological
worldview, though not into a young-Earth creationist worldview.
One way is to suppose that while microevolution is driven by
natural selection, macroevolution is engineered.  This is roughly
the view described in the UB.

To be sure, we don't *need* any such hypotheses to attempt to
understand why our adaptation to agricultural diet is so very
partial.  I offered it only as a suggestion to someone who might
be interested in following that theological trail.

Todd Moody
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