8/21/19 Wishing Jesus a happy birthday!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful celebration of Jesus’ birthday this year!

I am celebrating Jesus birthday with an effort to be more tactful on social levels and more cautious on technological levels. This is an important present for me to give Jesus because I am inclined towards discussing controversial subjects.

If you want to know why discussing controversial topics is so important to me, check out the interview I did with Derek Samaras on his new Spirit of Truth podcast. Keep listening and eventually you will get your answer to that question. (Or you can just skip all the best parts and jump ahead to 1 hr. and 3 minutes into it. Suit yourself. 😉 )

For all kinds of reasons, I do not feel sufficiently safe and secure on facebook with respect to discussing eugenics, race, IQ, gender identification, etc. Even freedom of speech is no longer a safe topic of discussion.

It is bad enough how the free flow of ideas on controversial subjects is discouraged by agenda driven algorithms and our own internal challenges with discussing Urantia Book teachings in relationship to today’s world. But on top of that, we also need to be concerned about having our identities hacked and our purchase histories sold off.

Why give that information away to facebook, I am wondering? My efforts could be improved with additional and more direct knowledge about how people respond to the information I put out.

My new approach is to go more old school—emails that are also posted on the UBannotated website. This is a simple method that allows me to feel safe to say what I think needs to be said. And it allows me to track (and thus serve) my own community of interested people more effectively. I will continue to post on facebook when I have sent out an email, so that people who do not want to be on the email list will have some notice to check the website.

A Xmas present for people who use their phone.

I am going to start respecting the fact that people use telephones as much as computers these days to receive emails and access the UBannotated website. People who use their phones cannot make use of the double column format, of course. But all the links I have been providing in emails and posts to facebook were for the double column format. Sorry about that phone users!!! Your day has come.

From now on, all links to annotations will now be provided twice, consistent with how the website is designed to function—one for the double column format that includes the text of the UB and one for the single column format that has just the annotations.

Additional additions:

The “More by Halbert Katzen” page is reformatted and includes some new entries.

New Annotations:

An astrology related cross-reference has been added to (122:8.7) “Jesus was born August 21 at noon, 7 B.C.” (double column) (just annotations)

At 71:2.13 there is now a link to an article from the Economist on global freedom of speech issues. (double column) (just annotations)