Fans Of Space Jesus: The Conversation About The Urantia Book On YouTube

A look at the seekers and the message they seek

Three weeks ago, I published my essay on The Urantia Book, perhaps the most famous example of a genre of occult literature that was popular in America for almost two centuries before the first flying saucer sightings. As I explained in that essay, the ‘Space Jesus’ religion presented in the UB has roots in the extensive writings of 17th century ‘prophet’ Emanuel Swedenborg, whose descriptions of people on other worlds captured the spiritual imagination of the early United States.

The essay is now UNLOCKED for free reading through next Wednesday. Read it while you can!

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Inventing Space Jesus: The Urantia Book And Extraterrestrials In American Religion

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As noted in the essay, there are still believers in the UB, as well as former believers still influenced by the book. A brief survey of YouTube content related to the UB reveals a lively, if low-level, conversation still taking place. And it tells us something about the kind of spiritual seekers who are attracted to the UB in the first place.

Bob Kezer thinks of himself as spreading the teachings of Jesus. He speaks of the “fruits of the spirit” and things that are “of the devil.” Reflecting the Seventh-day Adventist ideas at the core of the UB, Kezer rejects the crucifixion as atonement for sins. He is both disparaging of woke and also obsessed with achieving world peace. Kezer questions the authenticity of the first three parts of the UB.

It is the fourth part, the last third of the 2,000 pages that reimagine the story of Jesus Christ as seen through the eyes of angelic eyewitnesses, that Kezer finds worthy. He likes Space Jesus.

By the end of the video, we learn that Mr. Kezer’s limited belief in the UB is consonant with the “conspiracy to divide” the human race, the conspiracy to conceal the flat earth, the moon landing conspiracy, and the time that the CIA told Jimmy Carter God does not exist. The world is a lie and Bob Kezer has achieved the rare and advanced education level necessary to see through the veil. He even acknowledges that only an intelligent, dedicated reader can ever comprehend the true value of the UB. This is gnosticism.

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John Davis, who goes by the moniker John of New, recognizes the influence of “the Theosophical Society” and “New Age thought” consistent with “metaphysical communities” of the early 20th century. Mr. Davis mentions Edgar Cayce, a figure that still awaits examination in this series. Echoing the point of this essay series, Davis recognizes that “celestial beings” and “alien contact” were part of the “collective consciousness of the time … that sort of information was coming through everybody” involved in alternative revelation.

Mr. Davis criticizes the patriarchal monopoly of spiritual authority in Christianity. He all but accuses the Urantia Foundation of grifting, for “we don’t need more religion” in the world. Instead, we need eight billion personal religions, all atomized, democratized churches of the self, our own personal Space Jesus. Mr. Davis finds the UB “too Christian,” and “too subjugative of an external God-force.” Authoritative father-gods do not “ring true” for him.

Mr. Davis asserts that universal reality is “all far simpler” than what is presented in the book, that it is too “highy complex, highly complicated in its ideologies.” He is however willing to let the viewer draw their own conclusions. The comments are filled with UB believers thanking John for the video and witnessing to their faith. The same is true for Mr. Kezer’s comments.

On his website, John Davis mentions a series of videos on the “Recovering Catholic.” As we have found in our most recent Skeptic Spirit essays, Space Jesus attracts a lot of ex-Catholic seekers. However, New Age religions are characterized by disintegration. No cult can remain united with two channeling mediums at the same time because their messages will differ.

Rather than a single New Age church, then, a profusion of New Age churches has given way to a la carte religion, an echo of the disintegration of the Swedenborg-inspired ‘New Church of Jerusalem’ in early America. In what author Tara Isabella Burton calls “the great remix,” everyone is making their own revelations.

Mr. Davis is an example of this phenomenon, though he is also a fierce critic. “In the year 2000, after nineteen psychics told John Davis he ‘walked with Jesus’ John underwent a past life regression,” reads his creation story. “This is a recording of that regression. You will hear John meet Jeshua Ben Joseph (Jesus) and also witness his crucifixion. John came away from this experience with a new understandings of his teachings.” He had encountered his own personal Space Jesus.

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Jay has left religion behind since he made this video of the top fourteen “most outrageous, shocking, earth-shattering, and life-altering claims and revelations from the Urantia Book.” At the time, however, his sincere Christianity was evident in his high regard for the UB. Alien DNA and Thought Adjusters make sense to him as Christian explanations for human life on earth.

Dr. Adam Russo is perhaps the most interesting channel I have found so far that is focused on the UB because according to the bio for his day job, Russo is a Licensed Professional Counselor, EdD, MS, LPC, CCTP, ADHD (he, him). Russo “spent over 11 years of professional academic experience in the arenas of criminal justice (AS), public safety (BS), mental health counseling (MS), and traumatology (EdD)” and “has experienced the entire gamut of psychological care including outpatient, clinical day, IOP, in-home, residential, and inpatient care.”

As we have learned in this series, therapists are the key vector through which the extraterrestrial mind-virus has been legitimated and spread since the beginning of the Cold War. Behind the pseudoscientific rationalizations and logical fallacies, there is a genuine core of belief animated by a humanistic impulse to heal the world.

Thus, we find that a perfect free state of atomized religion seems to produce ionized spiritual seekers who explore a broad pastiche of ideas — Freemasonry, Egyptian reincarnation, Ascended Masters, racialized narratives of directed evolution, Templarism, magic, etc — in search of a Space Jesus to heal the world. The UB is clearly supposed to appeal to such seekers.

However, those seekers are easy to capture, but difficult to retain, because they have perfect freedom of belief. They can contact the alien spirits on their own, the way Swedenborg did. They can find their own personal Space Jesus. It’s actually hard to keep people in a UFO cult when almost anyone can drive out into the desert near Area 51, look up into the sky, and pray to their savior for a religious experience.

Like the UB, the Urantia Book channel is very concerned with “personalization” and distributed spiritual authority in a vast, universal hierarchy. Here, there is mention of a “Creator Son” overseeing “each local universe,” all of them “projected to have 10 million worlds,” by which they mean inhabited worlds, by which they mean worlds that are inhabited by humans.

Belief in the UB requires “a paradoxical understanding” of the universe, we learn. This is another way of saying that Urantian religion is gnostic, i.e. derives from a hidden truth revealed by insight. You either ‘get it’ or you don’t. Also, the UB is explicitly linked here to the Hermetic principle, “as above so below / as below, so above,” what Swedenbrog rebranded as the ‘doctrine of correspondences’.

The universe, we learn, experiences “cycles of expansion and contraction” rather than a continuous expansion from the moment of a big bang. This is also the cosmology of Billy Meier, for example, because it is very common in Swedenborgian revelations to explain the history of everything as a series of cycles, usually seven, which of course lends the whole scheme a sheen of numerological significance.

Space Jesus offers a whole universe “filled with meaning and purpose,” and more importantly a plan for the “organization and development of the universe.” Our world, planet earth, “needs to change” in accordance with this universal hierarchy of spiritual authority. We need a “world government” to save us from chaos, and from an absence of meaning in our lives.

We also need to buy into the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine — borrowed from the medieval Bogomil heretics, a Gnostic cult — that the Archangel Michael incarnated as Jesus on earth, therefore the Jesus of the Bible is not the real Jesus, therefore we need the real Jesus. Only Space Jesus can truly save us. See how that works?

Urantianism is very concerned with “cosmic citizenship.” Every one of us is a distinct “personality” that exists in relationship to the divine plan for the cosmos. “We accept this miracle of being an experiencing self as being a gift from God,” that is, the I AM God that oversees the God of earth. Space Jesus the son has a Space God the father. Our nearness to the creater God increases as we progress through the seven circles of being in the seven universes, because we must have seven of everything, just like the Bible.

When Urantians quote Jesus, they quote Space Jesus, the Jesus of the UB, the thing that attracts the most seekers, whether they stay in Urantianism or not. Those who leave Urantianism in whole or in part often seem to carry some part of it with them. Even those who reject it seem influenced by the experience, as if the tiny gravitational pull of a passing rogue planet has affected their orbits. Such is the immensity of the immanentized Space Jesus.

Urantia-related videos do not get huge numbers on YouTube. However, they do provide an idea of what kind of person goes looking for Urantia and how Urantianism talks about itself. The Urantia Book offers a vision of creation that is vast enough to contain all the other holy books within its pages. Space Jesus is an all-American tradition, a promise of world peace through a universal program of enlightened consciousness.