Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that’s brewing up some crazy

I’m your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I’m Shea, and this week I learned T.S. Eliot added the S to his name because T.Eliot backward is “toilet”.

This Week’s Beer

Olde English 800 – Miller

From Listener PornHub Hoodie

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/105/3350/

• Aaron: 5


• Shea: 4

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Aliens, Herbalists, & Bears, oh my!

Being a good British show Doctor Who has, more than once featured “a cuppa” which is either British or Galifrain slang for a cup of tea.

First seen in Series one, episode four, titled Marco Polo, each Doctor has had, at some point, their own cup of tea. According to the Eighth Doctor, one should “never turn down tea if it’s offered. It’s impolite, and that’s how wars start.” Perhaps most notably in Christmas Invasion the first-holiday special featuring 10, Jackie brings a thermos of tea into the TARDIS so they’ll have a snack during the end of the world. “Very British” according to Rickey… I mean Mickey… When the tea falls into the TARDIS’ dash it turns to steam, awakening the 10th Doctor from his regeneration-sleep, with the Doctor declaring “Tea! That’s all I needed! Good cup of tea! Super-heated infusion of free-radicals and tannin, just the thing for healing the synapses…”

But no, this isn’t a story about Doctor Who, this is my perhaps sad, diet-Coke version of a Mike Hall intro.

Ashley and I drink a fair amount of tea. She more than I, but our pantry is pretty well stocked with an assortment of teas from all over the world. From Macha to Earl Grey, hot. One of our favorites is Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Herbal Tea.

It’s a tasty wind-down tea for sure. Made with chamomile and, apparently, like 30 other bits of shrubbery found in the Colorado mountains.

I never would have guessed it, but Celestial Seasonings is semi-local. Also, in terms of guessing, I’d have been the more right about the location — with horseshoe rules of course — because even if I’d said New Zealand, I’d be closer to the right place than all the rest of the stuff I’m about to talk about is to reality.

And no, despite where I’m sure many of you think this is going, I’m not going to debunk Sleepytime. Unlike the Doctor, a cuppa isn’t going to wake your nan from her coma, heal your broken bones, or align your chakras. Tea isn’t medicine. At least, not anymore. A cup of boiled aspen bark might have been better than nothing in the ye-oldie, splinters-can-be-fatal times. but no longer.

Chamomile is generally associated with drowsiness, but it’s not melatonin or chloroform. And the tea isn’t magic, but a nighttime cup of tea and a bit of quiet do go a long way toward helping many people sleep. Not sure that the ingredients of the tea are the linchpin of that process though…

So, what was all of that? Well, it was a time-filling, long-winded, dismissal of medical tea nonsense so we can talk about what really matters. Their name, religious practices, eugenics, and the aliens that inspired it all…

The Doctor is an alien. See, see! I planned this. Kinda.

Speaking of timey wimey, the year is 1969. Some friends are hiking the Rockies in Colorado and discover that most of the plants here become tea if you dry and boil them — so they start a tea company. Fresh off the Summer of Love they name it after one of their girlfriend’s flowername, and Celestial Seasonings is born.

Which is super cute and totally fits on the side of a tea box.

However, Mo Siegel and John Hay, two of the founders of the company, are also super into the new-age bible, The Urantia Book.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the book, as I was before this story, it’s a crazy-town, alien-Jesus, woo-woo affair written by William Sadler around 1900 for a Seventh-Day Adventist splinter group. The full book is available though because the Urantia Foundation said it was written through superhuman/alien/whatever beings, the Arizona Supreme Court said they couldn’t copyright it. Also, it’s just frilly nonsense for Sadler to not-hide his racism.

And it makes for great pod-fodder! But moving on…

It’s 1970 and they’re enlisting wives, girlfriends, also probably male friends, into picking herbs from a naturally growing field they found hiking around Boulder. So, found tea. Guess we can all be glad they knew what poison ivy looked like. From this comes Mo’s 36 Herb Tea which was sold, according to celestialseasonings.com, exclusively in an unnamed Boulder health food store.

Meanwhile, Mo is finding the company’s moral compass in Urantia.

In You’ve GOT to Read This Book! 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life he writes, “I wanted spiritual adventure, and I was on the ride of my life. I was searching for truth and the book was loaded with it.”

How much truth? About four and a half pounds worth. Or 2,097 pages. Not sure if truthiness is a measure of mass or volume…

Anyway, let’s have some tea-guiding, flowerchild-wooing, truth!

How about, per Mo, “Lucifer, Satan, Melchizedek, Adam and Eve, and Jesus are all extraterrestrial beings who have visited Earth.”

Yeah, how’s that for 0 to 60?

The book is all over the place. The first third is a description of the universes, and superverses (no idea), explaining the invisible seraphim, spirits, and semi-spirit beings that inhabit it. But alas, without the Avatar we may never make peace with them…

The second third of the book is more or less Jesus as you’re familiar with him. I mean, he’s got ovipositors in this one, but how is that any different from frankincense and mur really?

Also, there are billions of Jesuses… Jesussi?.. Jesusses… sons of god, on each of the 100,000 “local” universes’ 10 million inhabited worlds. But don’t worry, Earth, or Urantia, is the best.

When you die, you basically get Isikied to the next world until you eventually reach paradise.

But in case you’re worried this is a death cult, the revelator named the Brilliant Evening Star of Nebadon calls on Christians to join their “new cult.” Wait…

“The Urantia Book itself does not represent a destructive cult. But some of its self-proclaimed prophets lead groups that can be seen as destructive cults.”

Said Rick Ross, a cult expert who helped in Waco with the Branch Davidians. I’m not 100% sure if “helped” meant to be in scare quotes or not…

There we go. That was the “exculpatory” quote I was looking for. I, for one, feel a ton better.

He also assures us that it is the “true religion” and like all good books of god, offers… this book of god as proof. Dictated by “numerous supermortal personalities [who] made contact through the Thought Adjuster (indwelling spirit of God) of a particular human being on our world.”

Luckily, there’s no room for interpretation. The book was only translated from Uversa — yep — to Salvington, then into Satania, before finally English, and then the other 22 languages it’s been translated into since. So basically, it’s perfect.

“I thought that was just the goofiest thing I’d ever heard,”

Mo Siegel wrote.

And if I don’t finish this quote, he’s more or less right.

Unfortunately…

“After I read it, I was not concerned about who had written it or how it had been written because it was so powerful.”

Siegel, the other co-founder we talked about, retired from Celestial Seasonings a few years ago and is currently the president of the Urantia Foundation.

“After studying the teachings in The Urantia Book, I knew that it would feel selfish and wasteful to simply focus on material success,” he said. “So, as a young man, when I began thinking of what I could do to make a living, I immediately turned to the health food industry … The ideas [in The Urantia Book] were the inspiration for the uplifting quotes we print on the side of our tea boxes and on our teabag tags!”

Can’t get more direct than that.

Apparently, per Caroline MacDougall, their 5th employee back in the day, “It was a guide for making sure of the moral values that underlay the company at that time.” To the point where it was quoted in boardroom arguments. So… bible stuff.

Which is all fine and well — what’s wrong with a company’s moral center being extraterrestrial-friendly eh?

Well…

Siegal’s The Twenty Most-Asked Questions, which is about the Urantia Book, he’s very careful to remind us that “all persons are equal in the sight of God” and that “race should become irrelevant.”

There’s a lot of race stuff in the book. In almost every article I’ve read about it the author mentions that it’s either the or nearly the, most racist thing they’ve ever read.

But let’s start off light.

Hehe, rainbow light!

It would seem that 500,000 years ago there were six, color-based, races on Urantia (Earth). They were the Red men of rage and hostility; the jealous and petty Orange; Yellow men, fearful of all; while little Green men were, mostly, just and willful; the Blue race was most hopeful; and the Indigo Tribe… was.. compasionate…

Wait, no that’s the Lanter Corps.

Perhaps