Cino, it feels like I'm being pushed to do some self promotion, this "unwritten rule." I'd rather not, especially not on a different forum (the intro forum) from this one. There would be no context there relating to me here. Who reads that forum and why? LOL. I have been on a lot of forums and have never used the intro forum to introduce myself nor have I ever gone to an intro forum to peruse the personal stories there.
I'll be happy to introduce myself here, maybe that will be OK. I'm 79, I have had The Urantia Book since 1959 when my grandmother (Olga) in Chicago sent me one (in Minneapolis). I was 16 at the time. Olga was also the CPA (accountant) for the early Urantia Foundation. She had lived in Minneapolis too but around 1950 (maybe '48 or '49), I can't be sure. I remember she moved to Evanston, Illinois to be with her sister and with other like minded "Urantians" who lived there. I was born and raised in Minneapolis. I was raised Catholic and two years before The Urantia Book found me I had successfully thrown off that indoctrination and insanity, the Catholic church. (It gives me the shivers just thinking about it, all the pedophiles and such, praying to Mary (against Jesus' command not to do that, praying to dead human beings, again, against Jesus' command not to do that.)
I can thank puberty in part for helping me escape as I soon realized that being told that all my pubertic thoughts about girls were not actually sins at all, they were normal. That and the fact that at the end of 8th grade in the Catholic parochial school I went to, for the 9th grade I walked across the street to South High, one of Minneapolis' 10 or 11 public high schools, and surely got a new perspective there. My grandmother's sister, btw, (Emma) was the last living "Contact Commissioner" (the group which shepherded The Urantia Papers into print)
Also, my motivation for posting here in this particular thread was to try to correct an absolutist statement about The Urantia Book that seattlegal apparently made 10 years ago. She said, "it is a channeled work" when she couldn't actually know that, she simply made assumptions. Anyway, hopefully that's all settled now and my current continuing motive here will be to answer any questions about The Urantia Book that I can, any that come up. I don't want to argue about beliefs I can only tell you what I know and believe.
I took to The Urantia Book right away. It made perfect sense to me. It's too bad it doesn't make perfect sense to everyone, but then again, most for whom it doesn't ring their truth ring bell have not read it. And there are others, indoctrinated ones who are members of religions of authority who simply cannot accept it, often they say, "It's not biblical." And others of them object because they say, "it copies the bible." So they have their rejections both ways. Reading it seems to be too much to ask. And I can understand that up to a point, it is a big project, which separates the serious from the unserious. And certainly no one should believe anything they haven't read and somewhat understood. Seattegal also suggested I start a Urantia thread but I'm not inclined to do that either. Been there, done that. I just finished rescuing Princess Zelda and destroying Ganon in Breath Of The Wild a few weeks ago and I'm exhausted. It's not easy being Link.
And another thing, there are some who hijack what otherwise might be productive discussions about The Urantia Book for their own personal agenda of directing people to books they've read and to 3rd person "Urantian" websites to force "proof" on non-believers even before they ask for proof, derailing the discussion and the process before people even know what The Urantia Book is about. So no thread/forum about The Urantia Book will hopefully help to prevent that. Otherwise, it's deja vu all over again (LOL) and again and again, like when Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown. The only way that's going to stop is if Charlie refuses to play. Lucy can't be trusted. I hope this will suffice as an intro.