Urantiana

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Urantiana

The scenery is nice.

No adaptation of a written work will ever satisfy anybody. The music's wrong. The voices are wrong. They should have told the story in order like the book. The animation needs to be grittier. And so on.

I imagine that someday, maybe soon, Harry Potter fans, and Tolkien fans, using only the cheap and available modern animation software and their creative ingenuity, will completely re-work the terrible film adaptations to more closely portray the original narratives. (Somewhat absurdly, there's a project to re-create Star Wars, in a collage of live action, animation, silly and serious amateur videos. With Hans Solo shooting first, I expect. There's also a video of the Star Trek Original Series-Next Generation movie featuring both captains Kirk and Picard, with the Kirk-Original Series part entirely edited out.)

Theoretically, there will be many productions to come, a wealth of re-tellings of some or even all of the Urantia papers, from the sweeping human sagas woven into the teachings to enthralling educational videos. There might even be some cartoony re-tellings of tales from the papers. And fans will re-do the voices, change the music, re-order the telling, or whatever else they deem appropriate.

Alas, there will also be re-workings that do not favor the original teachings, or which defame or unjustly depict that which we would like to faithfully portray, but, the poor in spirit we still seem to have plentifully among us. Just keep clicking the like-button on the ones that do good.

I got to this video by way of this article:
Jesus 3D Animation Video Gets Over 100k FB Likes in Just 2 Days
Oddly, none of the links in the article actually go to the animation, and all mis-direct.
Finally located via YouTube search.




Urantiana

Anthropology moves a little toward the revelation.

The purpose of the Urantia papers was theologic revelation. Any scientific statements in the papers are supposedly limited to then-current knowledge, or to things which we cannot discover ourselves. Where the papers' scientific statements seem to differ from currently-popular theory among our scientists, some students of the revelation hold that the papers can be wrong, include errors, which science will "correct," while others believe that, even though no new scientific information was supposed to be revealed, nevertheless, the scientific statements in the papers would be fact, with which our scientific exploration has simply not yet correlated.

Anthropology is a soft science. Human development theory cannot be built up in a truly scientific experimental fashion; rather, our racial progress knowledge is based on whatever tiny fragments of evidence we are lucky enough to stumble upon, what random Nature has permitted by chance to be discovered. One cannot re-run an experiment in fossils, only try to find more to substantiate or refute theory. This inherently gap-plagued pattern of evidence lends itself to broad theoretical speculation. Further, soft scientists are more likely to fall into the traps of favored theories and finding substantiating evidence because you look for it.

Modern fashion has focused on the development of humanoids in Africa, which does not comport with the Urantia papers in practically any way, other than that the ancestry in Africa can be regarded as just one of many lines of human development. The various-colored "Sangik" races first appeared "500,000 years ago [in] the Badonan tribes of the northwestern highlands of India." (UP65 §5 ¶1) The Andonites of a million years ago "did not penetrate very far into Asia, and they did not at first enter Africa."(UP63 §5 ¶1). The popularized supposed African ancestor Lucy was in Ethiopia about 3.2 million years ago. The Urantia papers are not specific, but by five million years ago, the ancestor of humans had not yet appeared, (UP61 §4 ¶7) and it was not until "about one million years ago [that] the immediate ancestors of mankind made their appearance by three successive and sudden mutations stemming from early stock of the lemur type of placental mammal." (UP62 §0 ¶1)

While these early lemurs evolved in the Western Hemisphere, the establishment of the direct mammalian ancestry of mankind took place in southwestern Asia.

Which brings us to this report from June 5 by Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, in The Telegraph (UK).

Archicebus achilles, artist's concept

The mouse-sized fossil, which was discovered in China, is the earliest known cousin of humans yet to be found.

Scientists believe the creature, which has been named Archicebus achilles, provides new insights into where our ancestors first evolved.

Rather than evolving in Africa as was believed in the past, the discovery supports theories that the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans first appeared in Asia.

Researchers say Archicebus belongs on a branch of the primate evolutionary tree that eventually evolved into tarsiers, small mammals with big round eyes that live in Asia.

The fossilised skeleton, however, has some features – like a characteristic heel bone – that are still found in our closest animal relatives today.

Dr. Chris Beard, one of the team who has been studying the fossil at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said… "The evidence that early primate evolution was restricted to Asia is becoming more compelling by the day." … Dr Beard believes that our early primate ancestors began developing in Asia before moving to Africa around 35 million years ago.

The Urantia papers say that 30,000,000 years ago, "in western North America… the early ancestors of the ancient lemurs first made their appearance."

(The further back one goes, the greater the apparent disparity between science and the UB; one of the two — revelators or scientists — is off in the calculation of time.)

Was this Asian-Lemur ancestry known when the Urantia papers were indicted in the mid-1930s? Is this another "lucky guess" like the papers' support of the then-minor theory of continental drift? I don't have any idea. Do you?

I am strictly a self-taught, arm-chair scientist, and anthropology is a field which I've not been closely following, so I'm not sure how "new" this news is. And I'm open to correction to my facts and understandings.

On the unlikely chance that there's actually somebody out there who will read this, and further, would like to correspond with me about it:
Email to urantiana@mindfulwebworks.com may be published in whole or part.
Emails to webworker@mindfulwebworks.com will not be published.
I've opened comments below. Comments are moderated. I will not edit any comment, but I chose whether to publish them: comments must be courteous, relevant, and preferably pithy.

Similarly-themed Mindful Urantiana Webworks:
Scientific Evidence of Space Respiration
First People in the Americas
Anthropology & The Urantia Book on hominid evolution




UB comix

Reporting on miraculous events one week in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Report

Alpheus Twins
Monday Morning News: Ride into Jerusalem

Report from Jerusalem on the dramatic arrival of the alleged Messiah of Nazareth.

Rioter
Wednesday Morning News: Riot in the Temple Court

Everyone's asking, how was this Jesus fellow involved in yestereday's disruptions at the Temple?

3 Stalwart Galileans
What Happened Wednesday: A Day with God in the Hills

Sincerity plus persistence can get you there.

Roman Captain
Friday Early Report: Arrested and Tried

Well, looks like that "Jesus Revolution" is allll over, folks!

Grieving
Saturday Newstime: After the Crucifixion

#PromisedToReturn

Joyous
Sunday Special Report: Reportedly Risen

Astonishing news. Almost unbelievable.

By the fire
We Meet Again

On better days, on peaceful shores, with enough time.

Acknowledgements and Notes




Urantiana

It's not about UFOs. It's about your revelation.

1.
D    C   A   Dm   G
I've got a   blue You book.
F                G
I wish You would take a look,
    F              Em
But only if You're int'rested
   Dm             C
In what it has to say 
           Dm
Concerning what You ask about.
Em
You can look with honest doubt,
            F
But it will never help You out
   G
If You explain it all away.
2.
Am
You can never realize
G
What You won't internalize.
F
No surprise can come from
Em
Anything You read
Dm
You can argue and debate
Em
Never have to correlate
     F
Your life with what it has to state
         G
On human need.
3.
        Am
You can choose to worry, or
G
Choose not to worry anymore,
F
Listen to or just ignore
            Em
Your better side.
Dm
No one else will make Your choice.
Em
Only You can use Your voice
            F
For singing love or making noises
       G
Out of pride.
4.
Am
Give the words a second glance.
G
Don't be afraid to take a chance.
F
You might find You like to dance
           Em
Instead of sit.
Dm
But no one else can dance for You,
Em
Or move in quite the way You do.
        F
And the blue You book
     G
  is for the benefit
       F     G  C
    of You
Above is as performed in the video, differing slightly from the
previously published lyrics and rudimentary chord notations

Also performed in Mindful Webworkshop #4




Cosmic rings

"Professor Roger Penrose from Oxford University says concentric circles discovered in the background microwaves of the universe … adds evidence to the theory that the universe has expanded ('the Big Bang') and contracted ('the Big Crunch') many times. … The research appears to cast aside the widely-held 'inflationary' theory of the origins of the universe, that it began with the Big Bang, and will continue to expand until a point in the future, when it will end. …

"They say that this means that … the universe cycles through aeons dominated by big bangs and supermassive black hole collisions. Professor Penrose believes that his new theory of ‘conformal cyclic cosmology' means that black holes will eventually consume all the matter in the universe. According to his theory, when they have finished, all that will be left in the universe will be energy - which will then trigger the next Big Bang - and the new aeon."

Eddie Wrenn, Daily Mail (UK) [Emphasis added.]

How cheery! It's still The Big Bang + Big Crunch Theory, now it's just The Big Bang Theory in infinite re-runs.*

(I remember a late-night session at college in the early 1970s, possibly not even a chemically assisted session, where a housemate of mine [waving at Charlie] and I worked out that this could be a likely scenario. Didn't realize we were so ahead of our time.)

A Urantia Papers student might ask, might these rings also suggest a cosmic substantiation of "space respiration"? (In fact, it was a comment by "FizViz, Brighton UK," conjecturing just this possible association, which brought this to my attention.)

The cycles of space respiration extend in each phase for a little more than one billion Urantia years. During one phase the universes expand; during the next they contract. Pervaded space is now approaching the mid-point of the expanding phase…. For a billion years of Urantia time the space reservoirs contract while the master universe and the force activities of all horizontal space expand. It thus requires a little over two billion Urantia years to complete the entire expansion-contraction cycle.

Your own local creation (Nebadon) participates in this movement of universal outward expansion. The entire seven superuniverses participate in the two-billion-year cycles of space respiration along with the outer regions of the master universe. … When the universes expand and contract, the material masses in pervaded space alternately move against and with the pull of Paradise gravity.

The Mail article notes that the universe's age is estimated to be 13.7 billion years, "and they have discovered 12 examples of concentric circles, some of which have five rings - which means the same object has had five massive events in its history." I'm not sure that calculation was comprehensibly stated, but if five events were evenly divided into 13.7 billion years, that's about 2.75 billion years per cycle. Pretty close, considering with all the variables there's a galaxy-wide margin of error.

Below the article, comments include this from one "Robert Tobin, Australia":

"Good bye 'God,' hello sense and logic and above all SCIENCE. … It was SCIENCE that made me Atheist even before I realised how stupid and illogical Religion is and how it spreads the Poison of the GOD VIRUS. THERE IS NO GOD, SO STOP WORRYING."

When I see this kind of remark, I usually think: "You know that the God you don't believe in? I wouldn't believe in him either." There is no logic in his anti-religious raving, no reasoning which draws a line between this scientific report and whatever problem he has with the concept of Deity. His remark sparked some responses, but I thought I would just contrast it here with this:

"Of the vast body of knowledge concerning the superuniverses, I can hope to tell you little, but there is operative throughout these realms a technique of intelligent control for both physical and spiritual forces, and the universal gravity presences there function in majestic power and perfect harmony."
A Universal Censor, P15 §0 ¶3

So, yeah, stop worrying. He got that right.




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