Hello everyone,
I’m Bob Kezer, the creator of the Son of Man: Urantia, project.
It’s a chilly Monday morning down here in the Ecuadorian Andes.
This videocast is addressed to the readers of The Urantia Book, and the organizations acting as custodians of the original text.
The Son of Man: Urantia, project is my rephrasing of Part 4 of the Urantia Book, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus.”
My main platform for publishing this project is my Substack page at robertakezer.substack.com. You can find all of the rough draft chapters there in all three formats: text, podcast, and videocast.
The purpose for this communication is to introduce the Son of Man: Urantia project, to respond to the arguments against it, and to ask for your support in funding the project.
And, if you’re one of many people out there looking for greater purpose in life, well, stick around because as far as I’m concerned we, humanity, are in the end-game, the smoke screens meant to deceive us are clearing, and there is no greater purpose in life than to dedicate oneself to serving man for nothing more or less than the sake of God.
My reasons for taking on this project are:
1. I agree with the authors of the revelation in that the life and teachings of Jesus contain the most important knowledge any of us can acquire in this, our first life, and that by humanity accepting the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man we can end the wars continuing to plague us.
2. I believe the only hope for humanity at this time is a strong United States of America based on our fundamental values. Because of that belief, I want to reverse the trend in our country toward atheism, and I want to clarify the misconceptions about Jesus that have arisin over the last two thousand years because of Christianity.
3. I believe that our world is in crisis, that the people’s ability to know the truth has been intentionally obscured, and that by fighting the symptoms of our problems rather than their root causes we’re kept in a perpetual cycle where we are controlled by others for their purposes.
4. I believe the most important action any of us can individually take to serve humanity, is to honor and foster the kingdom of God on Earth by again bringing forth Jesus’ original message of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
We know The Urantia Book is not sacred, perfect, or absolute, and that the authors say that Jesus’s message will have to be restated for future generations. Even during Jesus’ time with us, when the apostles got mad because some other guys had taken Jesus’s message and started preaching it in their own words, Jesus told them it was not only all right for them to do so but he hinted that that was more or less the plan.
The message of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity is what’s important: not the messenger who brings it.
In response to the arguments that no one has the right to rewrite Part 4, or that by doing so I am somehow violating some pact made between the authors and humanity:
1. The fact is that no translation is exact: all translations are approximations of the original text.
2. The authors themselves had to translate their records from their form of communication upstairs, to the English language of the early 20th Century. Hence, the original information transmitted to Earth was in itself a translation, it’s an approximation, of the actual celestial text.
3. In the story of the life and teachings of Jesus, the authors state at times that some section or another of Jesus’s lessons has been rephrased to make it more understandable to us today. In other words, the authors themselves restated portions of the original celestial text.
4. Every translation of The Urantia Book from that point on, into all of the many languages of Earth, is once again an approximation of the original text. Those of you who have proficiency in two or more languages well know how different the nuances in those approximations can be. In other words, my friends, no matter how hard any organization has tried to preserve the so called original text, the reality is that today the people reading each version across the planet are all reading a slightly different version: in other words, those reading the Spanish version are getting a slightly different understanding of the material than those reading it in Japanese or English or any of the other hundred plus languages into which the revelation has been translated. Each one is different.
5. Those of you who are in the Urantia fellowship groups yourselves restate parts of the revelation every time you talk about it to someone else in the hope of getting them to join your groups, where again you talk about it in your own language with the hope of getting them to read the original on their own. I’m doing the same thing, just a little more formalized. The only difference is – and if this applies to you personally you need to give it some thought – the goal being to get people to read the original text, or my goal which is to get out the message of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man regardless if the person reads the original version or not.
6. The authors state that the revelation probably wouldn’t be accepted at the time it was given to us, which suggests to me that they knew full well that language and meaning change with time, and that we would need to occasionally adapt the material to that fact.
Furthermore, at this point I’m a year into the project and I’ve rewritten the first 22 chapters of Part 4. That experience has led me to believe that Part 4 was actually written in a way that it would have to be rewritten to make sense to later generations.
What I’m saying, is that the writing in Part 4 is different than that in Parts 1-3. Part 4 is consistently redundant, it’s almost all in the passive voice, big words are used where small ones suffice, there are grammatical issues, and its wordy to the point that it makes the text more confusing than it should be. There’s no way around it: it’s bad writing.
And, I believe the reason the authors wrote it like that was because they knew that there was no way they could tell a story that would be readable to not only the people of 1950’s America, but to all future generations as well. So instead of even trying to write a text that would stand the test of time, it appears they decided to just screwed it up as badly as they could so us mortals couldn’t help but to get the message and do our part in the process.
My friends, until we get some actual celestial help down here, like in the form of a Material Son or a Planetary Prince, I don’t see any other way for us to meet our responsibility to carry on spreading Jesus’ message to the rest of humanity.
And urgency is demanded: Jesus’ essential message is fading quickly, and our world is suffering the results. We’re on an isolated planet, there’s no guarantee that we won’t screw this up, and the future of our world hangs, I believe, in this generation’s ability to reverse the trend we’re in now.
So, there you have it.
I’m rewriting the text at a 6th grade reading level, and I’m doing my best to maintain the original message. The result is coming out accessible to more people, and the text is more enjoyable for most people to read than the original.
Jesus taught us that to know the truth we need to set aside our rational mind, and listen to the subtle whispers arising in our hearts.
I’m asking you, the people already reading the Urantia Book and the one’s preserving the original text, to do that now and make your decision on whether or not to support me with the Son of Man: Urantia, project.
If you want, go to my substack page and compare one of my chapters with the original, and see how I did.
And my promise to you, is that I’ve decided that no matter how much I want to satisfy my own ego and add a section of personal commentary on to the end of each chapter, that that isn’t my job right now.
Maybe sometime in the future when I find a big rock to stand on, but first, my job is to rewrite the text as true to the original as possible, and to give those people spreading Jesus’ message a more appropriate tool to offer to the people of this day and age – the rewritten version of the Life and Teachings of Jesus.
If you’re looking for greater purpose in life, there is none more important today than spreading Jesus’s message of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity.
And everybody, this is a burden-free message. You are not in control of the outcome. It’s not up to you to convince someone of this or that. Your job is simple: spread the word of the Fatherhood of God and the subsequent brotherhood or siblinghood of man or humanity, however you want to phrase it, and then let the God in the person do the rest. There is no win or lose. Plant the seed, and don’t worry about who then later comes along to reap the harvest.
There are four specific ways I’m asking you to support me in this project. And to be clear, your help puts food on the table that week – it’s needed, and appreciated, that much.
1. Donation. This is the simplest way. Please use the PayPal button or the banking information under the Donations tab at my substack page, at robertakezer.substack.com
2. Buy digital PDFs of Volume 1 of Son of Man: Urantia (through chapter 19, 324pg.) at the store in the header on my substack page and email them to all of your friends as gifts. They only cost $2.98 each, and this is the best way to get the message to more people.
3. Subscribe to my substack page and get the weekly rough drafts of each chapter as it’s done in text, podcast, and video format. Subscription is free, but there’s also a tab where you can choose to subscribe monthly for as much as you’d like.
4. And finally, please take a few moments to share this video far and wide.
All right, mis compañeros.
That’s it. My parts done.
Listen to your hearts, my friends, and then take some kind of action to help me keep this project going.
Defend liberty. Protect your kids. And serve man for the sake of God.
Bobby Kezer