Unification Church: An Apology -- Part 4

Phil Donahue wrote in his autobiography that he would never let the Catholic Church tell him what to do. It is arrogance to think we can be so individualistic. God wants mankind to look for and follow the Messiah. He doesn't want people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Catholic Church, like all churches, is flawed, even deeply flawed, in much that it does. People should overlook the nonesense and focus on what is true.

Toffler wrote in Future Shock ... the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."

In Steven Hassan’s Combating Cult Mind Control, he tells of being a former member of the UC and is now a full time vocation of speaking out against cults and working with parents to counsel members of cults to leave. He gives an example. A family calls him from Minnesota telling him "Our son has gotten involved with the Moonies. He’s going on a three-week workshop with them in Pennsylvania on Monday. He’s a doctoral student in physics at MIT. Please help us."

He writes: "Their son had become a member of an organization called C.A.R.P. (Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles.). They had done some investigation and found out that CARP was the international recruiting arm of the Unification Church. We agreed that there was no time to lose."

The parents flew to Boston to have Steve meet with their son, Bruce. He writes, "Success or failure depended on how close Bruce was to his mother and father and how far the Moonies had already indoctrinated him. Had they gotten to the point where they could make him reject his family as "satanic’?" Steve told them that if their son "went to the three-day indoctrination, he could be locked into the group’s mindset thereafter."

"The next step would be for the parents to persuade Bruce to talk to me. I was worried about whether they could. The Moonies do a very thorough job of convincing people that former members are satanic and that even being in their presence could be dangerous."

He says the next morning he "taped a television show on cults, something I do frequently in various parts of the country." Then he went to a Chinese restaurant the parents had taken their son to. "When I arrived and met the family, the parent’s faces were full of worry and concern. Bruce tried to smile at first and shook my hand. But it was clear to me that he was thinking ‘can I trust this guy? Who is he.’"

They sat down at a booth and Steve asked him, "‘Did they tell you about pledge service yet?’ He shook his head and looked surprised. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh, that’s a very important ceremony members do every Sunday. Members bow three times [Since he wrote this Rev. Moon has changed that to one bow] with their face touching the floor before an altar with Sun Myung Moon’s picture on it and recite a six-part pledge [Rev. Moon has rewritten it and it is now eight parts] to be faithful to God, to man, and to the fatherland – Korea." A prominent leader in the UC has written a book called True Family Values for the public going into each part of the pledge which also is different than when Steve was a member. The pledge is printed at the end of the book.

Steve continues saying Bruce answers, "You’re kidding.’ At that moment I knew Bruce would be all right. Because I could see that he was not yet fully under the group’s mind control." Hassan goes on to explain how the UC uses front organizations to deceive people, how it is like the totalitarianism of George Orwell’s 1984 and how everyone is a slave "suffering the abuse of long hours of grueling, monotonous work – fifteen to eighteen hours a day, year in and year out. In essence, they become slaves with few or no resources, personal or financial, to leave the group, and the group does every thing it can to keep [it does not use violence he neglects to say] them as long as they are productive. When they fall sick or are no longer productive, they are often kicked out."

The UC does not have health insurance or life insurance. They did live in communes in the 70s and fundraised and lied to America and took young people out of jobs and colleges. Rev. Moon did not invent it. It was a general social experiment at that time but the Church does not do much of that anymore.

I won’t go into details on how some church members have written against him – even discounting his statements of how he was an insider and a leader and how is a faith breaker and why that is wrong and what is wrong about his accusations, etc. In the meantime Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of ruining the country and Catholics and Protestants kill each other in Ireland. This is a brutal world and everyone is trying to convert everyone else to do or believe in something. There are thousands of cults and religions in the world but Jesus was the messiah and now Rev. Moon is fulfilling his mission that Jesus couldn’t finish because he was killed at a young age.. He does not have delusions of grandeur, or is living luxuriously off of slaves and greedy and vicious and evil or even a kook.

Professor Richard Rubenstein who is currently President of the University of Bridgeport has written that "according to Amnesty International, over 60 countries currently practice systematic torture as a method of political domination." This is wrong. And he says kidnaping and so called "deprogramming" is also wrong. "Involuntary deprogramming is in actuality a form of religious persecution. Every society responds to dissenters in its own way. In medieval society dissidents were sometimes burned at the stake."

Today some psychiatrists support those who use violence against those who are not minors - 18 years or older, [the legal term is conservatorship which allows family members to take control of a loved one who has lost their senses usually in such cases as brain damage, old age senility, etc.] to scream at them endless hours in a locked motel room for days or weeks until he can finally see the light that he has been brainwashed by a dangerous group that never used violence to kidnap him or locked him in a motel room and screamed at him for days and weeks until he gave up the "outside" worlds views. He writes, "One wonders whether, had there been established psychiatrists at the time of the birth of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, such professionals would have certified the first adherents of each faith as ‘normal.’ I have little doubt concerning the kind of psychiatric certification the founders of the great religions would have received. Very clearly, unless, there is sound reason for believing that a new religious movement constitutes a definite threat to public order [there have been accusations that Rev. Moon is another Hitler into violence and cruelty that are totally untrue] , psychiatric evaluation and therapy ought to be left in the realm of free choice. The worst way to respond is to tolerate the kidnaping of adherents of the new faiths and their forcible subjection to deliberately contrived programs of psychic alteration."

Hitler started small and had his goons the SS troopers terrorize his opponents. Sun Myung Moon and most of his followers are law-abiding, moral religious people who abhor violence and denounce the tactics of deprogrammers of doing the very thing they accuse the church of. The UC is not a threat to what is good and true as a small church now or when billions join in the future. They are patriotic, moral and believe in the highest ethical standards. The core of its teachings and the life of Rev. Moon has been one of loving its enemies. This does not mean that it will not defend itself in a court of law against aggression or slander sometimes. They are not racist and believe in religious, political and economic freedom.

The UC is often mentioned when a sick cult makes news such as Heaven's Gate. Talk shows all bring on authors of books about former members and how cults brainwash people and how to deal with a loved one who has lost control and is being abused in a cult.

In Freedom and Destiny, Rollo May, a prominent social philosopher writes that a person should not "hand over their responsibility to the scientist in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church." Yes and no. Having heros and leaders is fine, but we must not get into blind faith and not give up our mind totally. May continues, So many have and now, he says, we live in "the age of the Robot."

He says, "The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil the face. This denial of evil – and freedom along with it – is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jamestown, or any other of the hundreds of cults, ... is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jamestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the world in their own mass suicides the final evil."

He goes on to say Adam and Eve had to "defy the orders of God" so they could have "freedom," ... "true autonomy" and "true independence." "This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be appendages of God. Along with guilt and alienation come the blessings of love, responsibility, and true reason and power to create." This is nonsense. We are supposed to follow God and many leaders in our lives. He goes too far and does not see that we are to carry our cross and give our lives to God and our country and our loved ones. It may look like slavery but in having vertical relationships is spiritual and freeing. He goes too far in being independent. Still, he is right that there are times when we must not follow.