The bible of eugenics
by Donna Kossy
[ strangeness - april 02 ]
The Urantia Book (UB) is a channeled bible of colossal proportions, describing the entire history of the Earth (called here 'Urantia') and the cosmos. In 2,097 pages it covers every conceivable topic from 'The Evolution of Local Universes' and 'The Seraphic Hosts' to 'Social Problems of Religion' and 'The Mind-Gravity Circuit'. In print since 1955, The Urantia Book has been translated into Spanish, Finnish and French and will soon be translated into Dutch, Russian, Korean, German, Swedish, Hungarian and Italian. Three hundred thousand copies have been printed. Bigger and stranger even than the incomprehensible 19th century 'new bible' Oahspe, The Urantia Book is also far more coherent. As it's devoted to the intricate organisation of such beings as 'Omniaphim', 'Seconaphim', 'Susatia' and 'Univatia' in 'local' and 'super' universes with names like 'Nebadon' and 'Vorondadek', however, ploughing through all 2,000+ pages could pose a major challenge. Over and above the mystery of how anyone could possibly read it is the mystery of how anyone could write it. When I first encountered The Urantia Book, I had no doubt that only alien intelligences could have come up with such a product. Its mere existence defied all probability.
Indeed, those who compiled and published the book, The Urantia Foundation of Chicago, compounded the mystery by keeping the identity of their channel a secret. But now, as a result of the sleuthing of ace debunker Martin Gardner, the identity of Urantia's channel, as well as the history of the Urantia Foundation are no longer in doubt.
In his book Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery, [1] Gardner produces strong evidence that The Urantia Book is essentially a Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) spin-off. Those central to the production of UB, Dr William S Sadler (1875-1969) and his brother-in-law Wilfred Custer Kellogg (1876-1956), had strong ties to the sect. Sadler, a famous psychiatrist, was the front-man responsible for the Urantia Foundation and for UB's publication, while Kellogg, a shy, unassuming businessman was, according to Gardner, the "the man who in his sleep... was the conduit through whom the supermortals first communicated their revelations to Sadler."
Those who knew him, writes Gardner, described Sadler as "a rotund little man with a keen sense of humor, snow-white hair, thick gold-rimmed spectacles, heavy jowls (one student likened his appearance to Alfred Hitchcock), and a man who usually wore baggy gray suits, white shirts, and out-of-style neckties." [2] He had joined the Seventh-Day Adventist Church at age 11. As a teenager, he worked in the kitchen of Dr John H Kellogg's (1852-1943) famous Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan (nicknamed 'The San'), which began as an SDA institution, and soon became a close friend of the influential doctor and health crusader.
In 1897 Sadler strengthened his ties to Dr Kellogg when he married Kellogg's niece, Lena Celestia Kellogg (1875-1939); both husband and wife then pursued careers in medicine. In 1901 Sadler was also ordained as an SDA 'elder', or minister.
In the meantime, after a long power struggle with SDA prophetess Ellen G White over the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Dr Kellogg was 'disfellowshipped' by the SDA Church. It was around that time that the Sadlers quit SDA as well.
But the Sadlers had created their own brand of evangelism, a self-help doctrine which blended the Bible, mental hygiene, health remedies and eugenics. In 1906, Sadler founded the Chicago Institute of Physiologic Therapeutics (later called the Chicago Therapeutic Institute). In 1909 his first self-help book, Self-Winning Texts, or Bible Helps For Personal Work, published by Chicago's Central Bible Supply Co, appeared. Many popular books followed, including Mind at Mischief (1929), which became a bestseller. Husband and wife would also make names for themselves lecturing on the Chautauqua circuit on such topics as unorthodox health remedies, hydrotherapy and eugenics.
Between 1901 and 1952 William Sadler authored over 30 books including: Worry and Nervousness, or the Science of Self-Mastery (1914); Measuring Men (1917); Long Heads and Round Heads, or, What's the Matter with Germany? (1918); Race Decadence: An Examination of the Causes of Racial Degeneracy in the United States (1922); The Truth About Spiritualism (1923); The Elements of Pep: A Talk on Health and Efficiency (1925); The Truth About Mind Cure (1928); Modern Psychiatry (1945); and Courtship and Love (1952).
Far less is known about the other central character of the Urantia story, Wilfred Custer Kellogg of the famous and somewhat in-bred Battle Creek Kelloggs. We do know that Wilfred Kellogg grew up in the SDA church, with Adventist doctrine permeating his early experiences: both Wilfred's father and grandfather were SDA elders, and his uncle, Moses Eastman Kellogg, was a prominent SDA editor and writer. Wilfred found his calling in business rather than theology, however, becoming business manager of the W K Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flake Company, [3] where he stayed until 1910.
Wilfred married his first cousin, Anna Bell Kellogg (1877-1960), who also happened to be Lena Kellogg Sadler's sister. (Thus, he was both cousin and brother-in-law to Mrs Sadler.) The newly-weds moved into the Sadler's building at 533 Diversey Parkway on the Near North Side of Chicago. The building, which later became headquarters of the Urantia Foundation, served not only as home to both couples, but also headquarters of the Sadlers' Chicago Institute of Physiologic Therapeutics, with Wilfred as business manager.
The channeling activities that evolved into The Urantia Book probably began in 1912. One evening Anna Kellogg knocked on the Sadlers' door to tell them that something strange was happening to her husband. The Sadlers rushed downstairs to the Kelloggs' apartment, where they found Wilfred in a deep sleep. But this was no ordinary sleep, as their medically informed probings revealed. He would hold his breath for long periods. His body lurched about. They jabbed him with pins, but he couldn't be roused. Wilfred awoke an hour later, feeling fine, and remembering nothing.
A few weeks later, the conservative businessman began having similar episodes on a regular basis. During one such spell Mrs Sadler asked Wilfred a question. In a voice not his own, he replied that he was a "student visitor" from a distant planet; then, uncharacteristically, he began to converse with the Sadlers on matters of philosophy and religion.
A growing number of alien visitors used Wilfred as their voice. The Sadlers quickly grasped that they had a unique opportunity before them and began asking the celestial intelligences important questions. The conversations that ensued lasted for the next 10 years. Wilfred, however, could remember none of the goings-on, even under hypnosis.
In 1923 the Sadlers hosted the first of many afternoon teas to discuss religion, attended by 20 to 30 friends. After a few of these get-togethers, Sadler broke the news about the channeled revelations. Soon, the guests - thereafter known as the Forum - began coming up with their own cosmic inquiries, and brought them to the meetings. One night, presumably without knowing what was going on, Wilfred wrote a manuscript, 472 pages long, in answer to the Forum's many questions. Sadler calculated that it would have taken eight hours, writing as fast as possible, to produce that many pages. Even so, the next day, Wilfred's arms weren't even fatigued. Nobody at the Forum doubted that the manuscript had been authored by a non-human intelligence.
Sadler later recounted how the original Urantia manuscript was written:
We found there seemed to be an organized group of high intelligences on "the other side," prepared to present to us the whole astounding story of the universe, leading from God, the Universal Father, down to the origin of the human creature, man, and his ultimate glorious destiny beyond the reaches of time and space.
This continued for perhaps seven or eight years when what we considered the first edition of the papers was finished. At that time, the Forum received its first direct message, and its members were advised that now, since their knowledge had been expanded, they should be able to ask more intelligent questions and that if they would do so, as they commenced a rereading of each paper, these intelligences would completely revise the entire, tremendous manuscript. [4]
Eventually, Forum members other than Wilfred - often Sadler himself - tried their hand at channeling the Celestial Intelligences. But through it all, Sadler insisted the identity of the initial channel remain a secret. Not even the Forum knew who it was. In the end, The Urantia Book was a joint project between Wilfred Kellogg, the Sadlers, the Forum, and the Celestial Intelligences.
After its publication in 1955, The Urantia Book's audience grew, slightly. UB was never promoted much, the foundation preferring to keep the group small, with belief spread by word of mouth. Believers, who today total no more than a few thousand, meet in study groups and Urantia societies, each society consisting of 10 or more believers. Currently, there are about 200 Urantia study groups and 20 Urantia societies. One current member characterizes Urantia readers as "fairly iconoclastic" people who "keep to themselves". They do not consider their belief in The Urantia Book a religion.
In 1989 copyright and trademark problems caused a rift in the organisation. The Urantia Foundation split into two organizations: the International Urantia Association and the Fellowship of Urantia Book Readers, both remaining in Chicago. A judge eventually ruled that rights to The Urantia Book are in the public domain. Hence, new editions of UB have begun to appear.
Cosmology and human origins in The Urantia Book
The Urantia Book's cast of characters sound as if they belong in Flash Gordon. But many of them, like Adam and Eve, come straight from the Bible. Many place names sound biblical ('Jerusem', 'Bethsaida', 'Capernaum', 'Satania', 'Edentia') but are not. The UB reads as an amendment to the Bible, not a replacement for it.
Traces of Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine and jargon can be found all over the book. Gardner points out that both UB and SDA universes are teeming with inhabited worlds; UB and SDA agree that the otherworldly intelligences are deeply interested in earthly goings-on. Only on Earth is there "A Great Controversy" between Christ/Michael and Satan, and, both agree on the doctrine of "soul sleeping", that at death, the soul literally goes to sleep, and that the body is reconstituted at resurrection.
The Urantian universe borrows SDA doctrine from Sister Ellen G White, but also rebels against it by incorporating foreign elements: the metaphysical I AM concept, early- and mid- 20th century science and eugenics, endless organisational hierarchies, as well as what can only be identified as unique products of imagination.
The UB's cosmology reads like the constitution for a surprisingly well organised Universe. The UB is simultaneously redolent of bureaucracy and the Bible, filling in all the Bible's blank spaces with copious, organised detail. What the Bible takes a few paragraphs to describe - the creation of mankind for instance - The Urantia Book tells in hundreds of pages. It's what the Bible would have been like if it had been written by lawyers and businessmen, rather than priests, prophets and poets.
In the UB, all of creation is known as The Master Universe, a perfectly organised structure. At the center of the Master Universe is Paradise, containing the great I AM. Paradise, the largest body in the Master Universe, is beyond our time and space, elliptical, flat and motionless. Orbiting Paradise is the universe of Havona, which consists of three groups of seven worlds each; and around those 21 worlds are seven elliptical rings, each containing a billion perfect, unique and timeless worlds.
Outside Havona are two elliptical rings of dark gravity bodies that maintain the interior universes in balance. Universes reside outside Havona as well: beyond the gravity bodies dwell seven imperfect superuniverses which continue to evolve. Each will eventually contain 100,000 local universes, and each local universe will contain 10 million inhabited worlds.
Earth/Urantia dwells in the seventh superuniverse, the 606th world in the planetary group of Satania, which contains 619 inhabited worlds and 200 worlds that are currently evolving towards habitation. Satania's headquarters can be found in the world of Jerusem. One can't help but notice the choice of names here: Satania and Jerusem. Those familiar with the Bible (the ex-SDA members who make up UB's readership, for instance) may easily incorporate these familiar-sounding names. Though the name 'Satania' sounds evil, its identity as the planetary group in which Earth/Urantia happens to reside neutralises that impression, assuring readers that perhaps evil is an accident rather than an inevitability.
Satania resides in a constellation of 100 systems called Norlatiadek, with headquarters on the planet Edentia, another suggestive name which, as we'll see, lent its name to the Garden of Eden. Norlatiadek is itself the 70th world of the universe Nebadon, the 84th universe in the minor sector Ensa, which is the third minor sector in the major sector of Splandon, which is the fifth major sector of the seventh sector superuniverse Orvonton.
Like its cosmology, UB's story of the creation and evolution of life is strangely bureaucratic in flavor. Life and evolution are carried out by beings following master plans devised by their superiors. Members of the cosmic hierarchy always follow strict rules which cause the universe, with all its sectors, sub-universes and worlds to run properly. Urantia is no different from any of the other worlds except for one thing: those in charge of seeding and inhabiting Urantia failed to adhere to the master plan - with tragic consequences.
UB describes the process whereby life is designed and carried to all the evolving worlds - not just Urantia - all according to plans formulated by the Architects of Being:
Life does not originate spontaneously. Life is constructed according to plans formulated by the (unrevealed) Architects of Being and appears on the inhabited planets either by direct importation or as a result of the operations of the Life Carriers of the local universes. [5]
In the universe of Nebadon 100 million life carriers, an "efficient corps of life disseminators", all answer to their superiors: Gabriel, Father Melchizedek and Nambia. They are efficient, and highly organised:
Life Carriers are graded into three grand divisions: The first division is the senior Life Carriers, the second, assistants, and the third, custodians. The primary division is subdivided into twelve groups of specialists in the various forms of life manifestation. The segregation of these three divisions was effected by the Melchizedeks, who conducted tests for such purposes on the Life Carriers' headquarters sphere. The Melchizedeks have ever since been closely associated with the Life Carriers and always accompany them when they go forth to establish life on a new planet. [6]The College of Life Planning on World Number One is devoted to the study of universal life, with teachers and advisors from Uversa and Havona in Paradise. Life Designing - an inordinately technical process - takes place on World Number Two:
There are over one million fundamental or cosmic chemical formulas which constitute the parent patterns and the numerous basic functional variations of life manifestations. Satellite number one of the life-planning sphere is the realm of the universe physicists and electrochemists who serve as technical assistants to the Life Carriers in the work of capturing, organizing, and manipulating the essential units of energy which are employed in building up the material vehicles of life transmission, the so-called germ plasm. [7]
After life has been successfully transplanted onto a world by the Senior Life Carriers, evolution begins. Eventually the process of evolution reaches its pinnacle: primitive man. Evolution on millions of worlds always has roughly the same outcome: primitive man splits into six races, each a different colour: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo, red being the earliest race and indigo (black) the latest. Evolution is anything but a random process. These colored races appear during the development of language and creativity, after mankind learns to stand erect. The colours correspond to the known human 'races' here on Earth: unsurprisingly, the red race corresponds to Native Americans, the yellow race to Asians, the indigo/black race to Africans. Somewhat less obvious is that the blue race corresponds to Europeans.
In UB, not all the races are equal, as the "earlier races are somewhat superior to the later; the red man stands far above the indigo - black - race." Life Carriers impart the "full bestowal of the life energies" to the red race, but "each succeeding evolutionary manifestation of a distinct group of mortals represents variation at the expense of the original endowment." Hence, generally, the red race is tallest, for example, and the indigo race is shortest. Furthermore, the first, third and fifth races (red, yellow and blue) are superior to the second, fourth and sixth (orange, green and indigo), who are "somewhat less endowed." Here, UB provides an embellishment to physical anthropology, rather than the Bible.
According to UB, it's quite natural that the "superior" races enslave the others. For example, "The orange men are usually subdued by the red and reduced to the status of servants." Likewise, "The yellow race usually enslaves the green, while the blue man subdues the indigo." Sometimes the orange and green races are exterminated, as they were here on Urantia. Because we aren't familiar with the orange or the green races, this 'natural' enslavement seems benign; what's more, the blue race isn't the only one engaged in it - the yellow and red races do it too. The only reason they're off the hook here on Earth/Urantia is that the orange and green races are no longer here to complain about it.
The development of the first human beings on Urantia went according to plan, as on most other worlds. About one million years ago, when "Urantia was registered as an inhabited world," a mutation occurred in the stock of evolving primates, which "suddenly produced two primitive human beings, the actual ancestors of mankind." This occurred during the "third glacial advance". The sole survivors of the original "Urantia aborigines" were the Eskimos, who "even now prefer to dwell in frigid northern climes."
The first human pair were not Adam and Eve, but prodigy twins named Andon and Fonta. (Adam and Eve did exist, according to UB, but were sent to Earth after mankind evolved to "uplift" the race, as we'll see.) Born to primate parents far less advanced than they were, Andon and Fonta had black eyes and swarthy complexions, presumably like the Eskimos. Unlike their parents, they were able to communicate with each other in an abstract verbal language. After losing patience with their dumb relatives, the twins left home to found the human race:
...the twins did migrate, and because of our supervision they migrated northward to a secluded region where they escaped the possibility of biologic degradation through admixture with their inferior relatives of the Primates tribes.
Shortly before their departure from the home forests they lost their mother in a gibbon raid. While she did not possess their intelligence, she did have a worthy mammalian affection of a high order for her offspring, and she fearlessly gave her life in the attempt to save the wonderful pair. [8]
Two years after their departure, Andon and Fonta produced a child, named Sontad, the first of 19. This first human family lived in four adjoining rock shelters and made their living by hunting in groups. Andon and Fonta both lived until age 42, when they were both killed by a falling rock during an earthquake.
About 500,000 years later, mutations occurred which produced the colored races, according to the master plan. This first mutation took place among the Badonan tribes of Northwest India, when a couple "suddenly" produced a family of unusually intelligent children, whose skins had a tendency to turn various colours when exposed to the sun. Five were red, two orange, four yellow, two green, four blue and two indigo. As they grew the colours intensified.
The red race, though they were the most intelligent, had problems with the yellow race and also warred among themselves. Eighty-five thousand years ago they migrated from Asia to North America. The orange race began migrating towards Africa, but were exterminated by the green race about 100,000 years ago. The peaceful yellow race was the first to establish settled communities, with a home life based on agriculture. The green race was less able than the others. The blue race (forebears of the white race), had the brain power of the red race and the soul of the yellow race, but they fought among themselves. They invented the spear. The indigo race, or the black men, who later settled in Africa, were the least progressive, and the last to migrate from their home territory. UB's story of the human races on Earth/Urantia, not surprisingly, conforms to the prejudices of certain mid-20th century North Americans.
As on other worlds, it was only after the evolution of the six races that the "Planetary Adams" in the form of Adam and Eve arrived, to "upstep" humanity. Adam and Eve and their descendants were of the Adamic, violet race. UB explains this process of "upstepping" as a plan that utilises the variations and endowments of all the races, to their fullest - but only if carried out correctly. Apparently, in the case of Urantia, it wasn't:
...These modifications [of the colored races] are beneficial to the progress of mankind as a whole provided they are subsequently upstepped by the imported Adamic or violet race. On Urantia this usual plan of amalgamation was not extensively carried out, and this failure to execute the plan of race evolution makes it impossible for you to understand very much about the status of these peoples on an average inhabited planet by observing the remnants of these early races on your world...
These six evolutionary races are destined to be blended and exalted by amalgamation with the progeny of the Adamic uplifters. But before these peoples are blended, the inferior and unfit are largely eliminated. The Planetary Prince and the Material Son, with other suitable planetary authorities, pass upon the fitness of the reproducing strains. The difficulty of executing such a radical program on Urantia consists in the absence of competent judges to pass upon the biologic fitness or unfitness of the individuals of your world races. Notwithstanding this obstacle, it seems that you ought to be able to agree upon the biologic disfellowshiping of your more markedly unfit, defective, degenerate, and antisocial stocks. [9]
The Planetary Prince usually arrives within 100,000 years of the time mankind begins to walk erect:
...These Sons, for there are two of them - the Material Son and Daughter - are usually known on a planet as Adam and Eve...
These Sons are the material gift of the Creator Son to the inhabited worlds. Together with the Planetary Prince, they remain on their planet of assignment throughout the evolutionary course of such a sphere...
...While there was a miscarriage of the ideal plans for improving your native races, still, Adam's mission was not in vain; Urantia has profited immeasurably from the gift of Adam and Eve, and among their fellows and in the councils on high their work is not reckoned as a total loss. [10]
Because the material sons' - Adam and Eve's - bodies glow with violet radiant light, they are called the violet race. The violet race's bodies range in height from eight to 10 feet tall. And, should they fail in their mission, they are cut off from the "connection with the universe source of light and life." Thereafter they become material beings, "destined to take the course of material life on the world of their assignment." "Material death" will eventually terminate their "planetary career". This is what happened on Urantia. It also conforms to the story of the Fall of Man in Genesis.
The Adams and Eves on each inhabited world always construct "garden homes", each named the Garden of Eden in honor of Edentia, the capital of their constellation. Their express mission is to "multiply and to uplift the children of time" by interbreeding with the evolutionary races. But they wait many generations in biological segregation while they build up their own, violet race. UB details this plan for "racial upliftment":
Usually the violet peoples do not begin to amalgamate with the planetary natives until their own group numbers over one million...
On normal worlds the Planetary Adam and Eve never mate with the evolutionary races. This work of biologic betterment is a function of the Adamic progeny. But these Adamites do not go out among the races; the prince's staff bring to the Garden of Eden the superior men and women for voluntary mating with the Adamic offspring. And on most worlds it is considered the highest honor to be selected as a candidate for mating with the sons and daughters of the garden.
For the first time the racial wars and other tribal struggles are diminished, while the world races increasingly strive to qualify for recognition and admission to the garden. [11]
On Urantia however, race improvement was an uphill battle. The "Caligastia Rebellion", an illegal attempt "to achieve planetary advancement independently of the divine plan of progression" through "unbridled personal liberty", left the planet in chaos. As a result, the planet was cut off from the other planets in the vicinity.
Adam and Eve arrived on Urantia 37,848 years before 1934.
At the time Adam was chosen to come to Urantia, he was employed, with his mate, in the trial-and-testing physical laboratories of Jerusem. For more than fifteen thousand years they had been directors of the division of experimental energy as applied to the modification of living forms. Long before this they had been teachers in the citizenship schools for new arrivals on Jerusem. [12]
Adam and Eve each stood approximately eight feet high, with blue eyes, and bodies that shimmered with light. They were vegetarians. They founded the "violet race", whose members had white skin and blue eyes, and could communicate with each other through telepathy. "This thought exchange was effected by means of the delicate gas chambers located in close proximity to their brain structures. By this mechanism they could send and receive thought oscillations." They ultimately lost this power, however, due to "the mind's surrender to the discord and disruption of evil."
Though the Bible tells a quite different story, the authors of UB are careful not to challenge its authority altogether, explaining that the legends we all grew up with are confused and inaccurate versions of real events:
The story of the creation of Urantia in six days was based on the tradition that Adam and Eve had spent just six days in their initial survey of the Garden...
The legend of the making of the world in six days was an afterthought, in fact, more than thirty thousand years afterwards...
The story of creating Eve out of Adam's rib is a confused condensation of the Adamic arrival and the celestial surgery connected with the interchange of living substances associated with the coming of the corporeal staff of the Planetary Prince more than four hundred and fifty thousand years previously. [13]
The creation story found in The Urantia Book seems fantastically ludicrous, because it synthesises the conflicting traditions of Seventh-Day Adventism, Darwinian evolution and racial assumptions of the time, as well as a penchant for intricately bureaucratic hierarchies. But the plot is entirely consistent (even if subconsciously) with the known beliefs of its probable authors: the Sadlers and Kelloggs.
Eugenics in The Urantia Book
The Sadlers and Dr John Kellogg, like many of their social class, pinned their hopes for mankind on eugenics, the movement founded by Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin) in the 19th century to improve the human race by better breeding. Eugenic methods included encouraging "better" human specimens to breed more often and with their own kind, and "defective" humans to breed less often or not at all. In 1906 Dr Kellogg founded the eugenically minded Race Betterment Foundation to "call attention to the dangers which threaten the race", to research the "causes of race deterioration", and to promote "biologic living." William and Lena Sadler as well were active eugenics crusaders. William Sadler authored at least three pro-eugenics books: Long Heads and Round Heads, or, What's the Matter with Germany? (1918), Race Decadence: An Examination of the Causes of Racial Degeneration in the United States (1922) and The Truth About Heredity (1927). In Race Decadence, Sadler repeated the eugenic gospel that our American genetic heritage is in jeopardy due to the fecundity of blacks and the influx of inferior racial stocks from abroad, concluding that "morality is hereditary" and that "some races are more moral than others." This view was well within the mainstream of the eugenics movement at the time. Lena Sadler, too, cut a swathe in the eugenics movement, authoring a paper entitled "Is the Abnormal to Become Normal?" read at the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932. Its thesis was that severe eugenic measures are necessary to stem the tide of racial degeneration in America. She pleaded:
Here we are coddling, feeding, training, and protecting this viper of degeneracy in our midst, all the while laying the flattering unction to our souls that we are a philanthropic, charitable, and thoroughly Christianized people. We presume to protect the weak and lavish charity with a free hand upon these defectives, all the while seemingly ignorant and unmindful of the fact that ultimately this monster will grow to such hideous proportions that it will strike us down, that the future descendants of the army of the unfit will increase to such numbers that they will overwhelm the posterity of superior humans and eventually wipe out the civilization we bequeath our descendants; and all this will certainly come to pass if we do not heed the handwriting on the wall and do something effectively to stay the march of racial degeneracy, for it is said that even now three-fourths of the next generation are being produced by the inferior one-fourth of this one. [14]
She went on to echo familiar eugenic themes. She advocated a federal sterilisation law, which she predicted would eventually eliminate most crime, insanity, feeblemindedness, moronism, abnormal sex, and many other types of 'degeneracy'.
In his 1918 book, Long Heads and Round Heads, or What's the Matter with Germany?, Sadler speculated about the effects of genetics on world politics, along the lines of racist American eugenicists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Grant, a wealthy New York attorney, argued in his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, that the Nordic peoples constituted a "native aristocracy" which rests upon "layer after layer of immigrants of lower races," but that the "great race" was in decline. Grant's disciple, Lothrop Stoddard, also an attorney, as well as a journalist and a Harvard PhD, worried about the undermining of white world civilisation by colored races and mental defectives in his best-selling The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (1922). Sadler himself focused on Germany rather than the US, in response to US involvement in World War I. He hypothesized that Germany is dominated by two main races: the Nordic/Teutonics and the Alpines. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair Nordics were blessed with long heads and high intelligence. The world's greatest leaders, including Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon were all Nordics. The genetically inferior round-headed, dark eyed Alpines, on the other hand, resembled primitive men and apes. Stupid and brutish, their sole talent was farming. Sadler concluded that Germany was threatened by inferior stock in the form of round-headed Alpines. Therefore the war that the US was then fighting (WWI) against Germany was necessary in order to defeat the round heads.
By an amazing coincidence, the entities who wrote The Urantia Book were as vehement about eugenics as the Sadlers. Though eugenics would seem out of place in other sacred texts, UB is saturated with eugenic doctrine. In UB, the eugenic principles of race betterment guide the Life Carriers and uplifters throughout the universe. When eugenic instructions are not carried out properly, the result is chaos. On most planets - object lessons in world eugenics - after Adam and Eve establish the violet race, the unfit are eliminated and the violet race (except Adam and Eve themselves) uplift the remaining, superior strains of mankind:
This age usually witnesses the completion of the elimination of the unfit and the still further purification of the racial strains; on normal worlds the defective bestial tendencies are very nearly eliminated from the reproducing stocks of the realm.
The Adamic progeny never amalgamate with the inferior strains of the evolutionary races. Neither is it the divine plan for the Planetary Adam or Eve to mate, personally, with the evolutionary peoples. This race-improvement project is the task of their progeny. But the offspring of the Material Son and Daughter are mobilized for generations before the racial-amalgamation ministry is inaugurated. [15]
The result is spiritual and mental improvement of the evolutionary races because of the "gift of the Adamic life plasm", usually accompanied by physical improvement, invention, energy control, mechanical development, the control of nature, exploration and "the final subduing of the planet." At the end of this period all races are blended to one color, "somewhat of an olive shade of the violet hue, the racial 'white' of the spheres."
On Urantia, however, we are "a full dispensation and more behind the average planetary schedule", because of "miscarriage of the ordained plans" for race improvement. Eugenics, according to UB, is not only scientific, it's universal law. The reason that our world fell behind, was the Caligastia Rebellion and the failure to eliminate the unfit. One can't help reading this as a divinely sanctioned mandate for aggressive eugenic policies.
The "default" of Adam and Eve followed the Caligastia Rebellion:
...[When Adam and Eve] addressed themselves to the all-important work of eliminating the defectives and degenerates from among the human strains, they were quite dismayed. They could see no way out of the dilemma, and they could not take counsel with their superiors on either Jerusem or Edentia. Here they were, isolated and day by day confronted with some new and complicated tangle, some problem that seemed to be unsolvable.
Under normal conditions the first work of a Planetary Adam and Eve would be the co-ordination and blending of the races. But on Urantia such a project seemed just about hopeless, for the races, while biologically fit, had never been purged of their retarded and defective strains. [16]
To carry out their mission of "upstepping" the mortal races more quickly, Eve consented to mating with a member of the Nodites, a mixed race. Adam followed suit, by mating with a Nodite woman. Though their descendants were allowed to interbreed with the mortals, it was strictly forbidden that Adam and Eve do so. Because they violated the divine plan to never themselves mate with a mortal, they were found to be in "default." Thus Adamic blood became more diffused than on other worlds, hindering the uplift of mankind.
While Adam and Eve patched up their work via last-minute eugenic controls, others were breeding haphazardly, producing mongrelised races such as the current inhabitants of Mexico, Central and South America and India. Even now, interbreeding between higher races (whites, with more Adamic blood) and lower races is ill-advised:
While the pure-line children of a planetary Garden of Eden can bestow themselves upon the superior members of the evolutionary races and thereby upstep the biologic level of mankind, it would not prove beneficial for the higher strains of Urantia mortals to mate with the lower races; such an unwise procedure would jeopardize all civilization on your world... [17]
When mere mortals advocate "elimination of the unfit" and race purification, they risk being accused of racism and selfishness, as were leaders of the eugenics movement. When the same message comes from a celestial entity being channeled by an unknown conduit, couched in bureaucratic space jargon, the risk diminishes. Though the Sadlers' and Kelloggs' deepest beliefs - that the human race must be improved by elimination of the supposed unfit - were not uncommon during the 1910s and 1920s, after that time, such ideas had to be re-packaged.
It remains a mystery, though, how the subconscious minds of Mr Wilfred Kellogg and others responded so perfectly to the task of encoding the new belief system.
Notes
1 Martin Gardner, Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery, Prometheus Books, 1995 [Back]2 Gardner, p39 [Back]
3 The founder of the company, Will Kellogg, was Dr John Kellogg's little brother [Back]
4 Quoted in Gardner, p117 [Back]
5 The Urantia Book, p396 [Back]
6 Ibid. [Back]
7 Ibid. p398 [Back]
8 Ibid. pp708-9 [Back]
9 Ibid. pp584-5 [Back]
10 Ibid. p580 [Back]
11 Ibid. pp585-6 [Back]
12 Ibid. p828 [Back]
13 Ibid. pp836-7 [Back]
14 Quoted in Gardner, p284 [Back]
15 The Urantia Book, p593 [Back]
16 Ibid. p839 [Back]
17 Ibid. pp586 [Back]
