I realize this is a very odd topic, but I can’t resist sharing. I am attending a higher education conference at which technologies for creating new textbooks is being discussed. The presenter described a new project at Penn State called BBookX, which is a tool that enables a robot (data analytics computing algorithm, really) to generate textbook chapters based on key words. So, just to try it out, I decided to have it write a chapter about The Urantia Book, for a course on religion. I am amazed by what it came up with! The chapter is 27 pages long, and represents a surprisingly accurate interpretation of the TUB. For example, the following was generated by the tool:
… Each person is said to receive one such fragment at the time of his or her first independent moral decision, on average around the age of five years and 10 months. The Adjuster then serves non-coercively as a divine partner in the mind of the individual for the rest of life, and to the extent that a person consents with their free will to want to find God, it leads the person toward more mature, spiritualized thinking. A person’s Thought Adjuster is described as distinct from either the soul or the conscience. In The Urantia Book’s teachings, the degree to which a human mind chooses to accept its Adjuster’s guidance becomes the degree to which a person’s soul ”grows” and becomes a reality that can then survive death. The soul is in essence an embryonic spiritual development, one parental factor being the divine Adjuster and the other being the human will.
=== Adherents ===
It is difficult to gauge how many adherents there may be as there is no central organization to census. Informal study groups “tend to sprout, ripen, then vanish or splinter” and have not been counted reliably. Readers sometimes join study groups after reading on their own for years or decades, others join them soon after developing an interest in the book, while “for most, worship remains as individual as the act of reading.” Disagreements over the legal ownership of the book, its interpretation, and the reception of new revelations have led to some splintering, though these disagreements appear to have been settled to the satisfaction of most adherents. The movement generally incorporates a nonsectarian view, contending that individuals with different religious backgrounds can receive the book’s teachings as an enrichment rather than as a contradiction of their faiths.
The small movement inspired by The Urantia Book has not developed clergy or institutions such as churches, reading rooms, or temples.
Pretty cool, huh?
However, the particular tool I am using is not designed to work like that. You cannot give it only one source of text and ask it to analyze or interpret it. It is designed to enable students to create their own textbooks based on a set of learning outcomes. So it goes out on the ‘net and finds all the available material on a particular subject, and creates a learning resource that describes that concept or subject from many angles, like a prism.