History & overview · every faith gets one
A book with 2,097 pages and no author who will admit to it.
The Urantia Book was published in Chicago in 1955 by the Urantia Foundation: 196 papers presenting themselves as a revelation composed by named orders of celestial beings rather than by any human hand. It describes an inhabited and administered cosmos, a long evolutionary account of this planet — Urantia — and a life of Jesus that runs to a third of the book. There is no church, no clergy, no sacrament and no membership: readers meet in study groups, and the movement's standing argument is whether it should ever become a religion at all.
Why it is filed this way
The movement has no membership, no ordination and no ritual, and many readers reject the word religion for it outright. It is carried here as a movement because it has a scripture, organised bodies that publish and defend it, and study groups that meet weekly.
The founding
A circle around the Chicago psychiatrist William S. Sadler said the papers arrived between 1924 and 1955 through a sleeping subject whose identity they agreed among themselves never to disclose, and which has never been established. The Urantia Foundation was created in 1950 to publish the result and did so in 1955.
No single founder — The Urantia Movement accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. A cosmos of inhabited worlds under a described administration, evolving toward perfection.
The divine. One Universal Father, expressed as a Trinity and mediated through an enormous named hierarchy of orders of beings. A fragment of the Father — the Thought Adjuster — is said to live in each normal human mind from about the age of six..
Death and after. Survival, then a long ascent through many worlds toward the Father, for those who choose it.