Urantia21: A Restatement of The Urantia Book for the 21st Century

“It was only after the days of Machiventa Melchizedek and Abraham that certain tribes of Semites, because of their particular religious beliefs, were called the children of Israel and later on Hebrews, Jews, and the ‘chosen people.’” “...the remnants of the Salem missionaries in Mesopotamia maintained the light of truth during the period of the disorganization of the Hebrew peoples until the appea...

“As India gave rise to many of the religions and philosophies of eastern Asia, the Levant was the homeland of the faiths of the Occidental world. The Salem missionaries spread out all over southwestern Asia, through Palestine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, and Arabia, proclaiming the teachings of Machiventa Melchizedek everywhere.” “The original Melchizedek teachings really took their deepest root in...

“In the days of Melchizedek, India was a cosmopolitan country which had recently come under the political and religious dominance of the Aryan-Andite invaders from the north and west.” “These Vedic newcomers had brought along with them their many tribal deities.” The Salem missionaries arriving in India preached the one Creator, the Most High. The teachers commissioned by Melchizedek arrived in Ch...

Machiventa Melchizedek is a local universe spiritual personality who “volunteered to do that which had been done only six times in all the history of Nebadon: to personalize on earth as a temporary human of the realm...” “It was 1,973 years before the birth of Jesus that Machiventa was bestowed on the human races of Urantia.” Melchizedek gathered a group of pupils, disciples, and believers at Sale...

“The evolution of religion has been traced from early fear and ghosts through many successive stages of development, including those efforts first to coerce and then to cajole the spirits.” “Religion progressed from nature worship through ghost worship to fetishism throughout the savage childhood of the human race. With the dawn of civilization, humans espoused the more mystic and symbolic beliefs...

“The earliest prayer forms were not addressed to Deity,” but “when the concepts of ghosts and spirits evolved, these petitions became addressed to the superhuman...” However, “Early humans did not perceive that material things were not the province of prayer. These simple-minded souls reasoned that food, shelter, rain, game, and other material goods enhanced the social welfare, and therefore they...

“The evolution of religious observances progressed from placation, avoidance, exorcism, coercion, conciliation, and propitiation to sacrifice, atonement, and redemption. The technique of religious ritual passed from the forms of the primitive cult through fetishes to magic and miracles; and as ritual became more complex in response to the increasingly complex concept of the supermaterial realms, i...

“Primitive people regarded themselves as being in debt to the spirits, as standing in need of redemption.” “As time passed, this concept developed into the doctrine of sin and salvation. The soul was viewed as coming into the world under forfeit — original sin. The soul must be ransomed; a scapegoat must be provided. The head-hunters, in addition to practicing the cult of skull worship, were able...

Fetishes are created to represent the spirits that reside in them. “At first, the spirit of a fetish was believed to be the ghost of a dead person; later on, the higher spirits were supposed to reside in fetishes. And so the fetish cult eventually incorporated all of the primitive ideas of ghosts, souls, spirits, and demon possession.” Fetishes evolved into totemism. “Totemism is a combination of...

“The ghost cult evolved as an offset to the hazards of bad luck; its primitive religious observances were the outgrowth of anxiety about bad luck and of the inordinate fear of the dead. None of these early religions had much to do with the recognition of Deity or with reverence for the superhuman; their rites were mostly negative, designed to avoid, expel, or coerce ghosts.” Religion finally evolv...

Tracing the development of religion continues with an analysis of the mysteries confronting humanity, including the function of luck (chance), the reality of death, and the concept of ghosts. “The emergence of these concepts initiated the long and wasteful struggle to appease the ever-displeased spirits, the slavish bondage to evolutionary religious fear, that long waste of human effort on tombs,...

“In the evolution of the human species, worship in its primitive manifestations appears long before the minds of mortals are capable of formulating the more complex concepts of life now and in the hereafter which deserve to be called religion. Early religion was wholly intellectual in nature and was entirely predicated on associational circumstances. The objects of worship were altogether suggesti...

The importance of clarifying and supporting the institutions of marriage and the home is illustrated by the devotion of three papers to the topic. The home is described as “humanity’s supreme evolutionary acquirement and civilization’s only hope of survival.” “Material necessity founded marriage, sex hunger embellished it, religion sanctioned and exalted it, the state demanded and regulated it, wh...

Marriage on Urantia “has progressed steadily from the loose and promiscuous matings of the herd through many variations and adaptations, even to the appearance of those marriage standards which eventually culminated in the realization of pair matings to establish a home of the highest social order.” From the perspective of the authors, “Marriage which culminates in the home is humanity’s most exal...

The authors of The Urantia Book stress the importance of family as the nucleus of civilization, citing marriage as the means to the creation of family units. “Marriage has given humankind the home, and the home is the crowning glory of the whole long and arduous evolutionary struggle.” “Today humanity possesses a rich social and cultural heritage, and it should be wisely and effectively passed on...

In spite of the handicaps created by the rebellion, civilization continued to evolve on Urantia. “Evolution can be delayed but it cannot be stopped.” “The influence of the violet race, though smaller in numbers than had been planned, produced an advance in civilization which, since the days of Eden, has far exceeded the progress of humankind throughout its entire previous existence of almost a mil...

The European races were gradually mixed with the Andites, and attained the most “aggressive civilization ever to appear on Urantia since the times of the violet race and their Andite successors.” The heavily blended white race is the result, continuing to grow and to intermingle for five thousand years. “During the past century this culture has been experiencing its best opportunity for blending i...

“Asia is the homeland of the human race.” “For over twenty-five thousand years, to nearly 2,000 B.C.E., the heart of Eurasia was predominantly, though diminishingly, Andite.” India is the only locality where all the Urantia races were blended, the Andite invasion adding the last stock.” Elsewhere in Asia, the red and yellow races predominated, with the yellow race ultimately driving the red race i...

“The second Eden was the cradle of civilization for almost thirty thousand years. Here in Mesopotamia the Edenic peoples lived, sending out their progeny to the ends of the earth...” “This paper depicts the planetary history of the violet race, beginning soon after the default of the Biologic Uplifters, about 35,000 B.C.E...” Over time, the violet race merged with the other existing races on the p...

“Most of the inhabited worlds of Nebadon harbor one or more groups of unique beings existing on a life-functioning level about midway between those of the mortals of the realms and of the angelic orders; therefore they are called  midway  creatures.” They are nonmaterial beings but display many human traits. Most of the midwayers on Urantia joined in the planetary rebellion and are now held in cus...

Eventually a second garden was established in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The high civilization of the first garden needed to be reestablished from crude beginnings. In this location, the children of the Biologic Uplifters began to multiply, and the biologic upstepping of the human races began. The Edenic couple spent most of the time training their children and their associa...

“The Edenic mission on experimental, rebellion-seared, and isolated Urantia was a formidable undertaking. And the Biologic Uplifters quickly became aware of the difficulty and complexity of their planetary assignment.” They found themselves tempted by the rebellious personalities still resident here, and succumbed to an insidious plot “to add a new scheme of world saving to the larger and more far...

The Biologic Uplifter couple assigned to Urantia arrived a little less than 38,000 years ago. “For ages the Biologic Uplifters had been instructed in the technique of improving a world in readiness for their specialized contributions to the advancement of evolutionary civilization; but now they were face to face with pressing problems, such as the establishment of law and order in a world of savag...

Planetary Biologic Uplifters are material beings who are citizens of Jerusem. They are dispatched as couples to planets that are deemed ready for an infusion of the superior genetic strain of the violet race as part of the planned evolution of humans on that planet. In preparation for the arrival of an Uplifter couple, a site reflecting advanced floral beauty and botanic grandeur is prepared for t...

As part of this revelation of the expanded concepts of the universe, this paper offers a description “of the social, moral, and political life of the most advanced human race living on a not far-distant planet belonging to the Satania system.” This planet’s history is similar to that of Urantia, and it was also involved in the Satania rebellion. While its system of government is not necessarily mo...