The case of Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon to be the Mother of Peace is a great case, but it is not compelling to me.
A Hybrid Case
Significance, Primacy, and Authority
Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon’s claim to be the ‘Only Begotten Daughter’ and the ‘Mother of Peace’ is a hybrid case. For once, she asserts that she is emerging as the ‘Only Begotten Daughter,’ a theological claim to superlatives such as significance, primacy, and authority. I find nothing concretely valid about that claim. Talk of the ‘Only Begotten Son’ or ‘Only Begotten Daughter’ plays useful roles in ordinary life, but such talk– I argue – doesn’t refer to any genuine feature of reality.
The terms are abstract notions around which a person’s mental life can be structured. The ‘True Parents’ are mirror devices that people may employ in order to ‘understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behaviour of themselves.’
Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon’s assertion as the ‘Only Begotten Daughter’ appears to somehow compete with the claim by her late husband, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to a commensurate significance, primacy, and authority as the ‘Third Adam’. Are they really the center of cosmic gravity?
Over a decade ago, I had come to recognize that there is little concrete validity to the Rev. Moon’s claim to be the ‘Second Coming’ or ‘Third Adam,’ long before I became aware of her similarly incredulous claim of the ‘Only Begotten Daughter’. It appears that their claims are aspirational at best. At times, I call myself the ‘only begotten German.’ And it seems that I am ‘the center of no gravity.’
Religion and Morality
Yes, as we all know, religion is a highly subjective domain of and in the mind of man. Yet, we cannot prove or disprove the existence of a god. Assigning human capabilities such as desire and empathy to a God is then, in my view, an act of anthropomorphism.
The situations or circumstances of a growing population of humans perhaps required the construction of a personified ultimate concern, a common ground of sorts, to foster cooperation among diverse people. Religion and morality are evolutionary outcomes of people needing to find ways and means to survive in and as a community. The ruthlessness of competition for limited resources is mitigated by learning and depending on cooperation. An imagined god of love facilitates humankind’s survival and that is better than the practice of punishing defectors or outliers alone.
So, I am a curious skeptic, who always was, and always will be a curious skeptic. I need to experience some concrete evidence for theological claims, and – after many years of observance – I have not experienced enough compelling evidence for me to believe in the cases of the Rev. and Dr. Moon being the divine incarnations of God as ‘True Parents.’ They are significant people, no doubt about that. I respect them highly, always have, and always will. But I had to remake my initial sense of their reality.
How Do We Know?
Good question. Some people say that they ‘know’ when they can coherently ‘think’ about something. Others say they ‘know’ when they ‘feel’ it in their hearts. So, men think, and women feel? Is that the case? Well, women also think and men also feel. We all think and feel and then some.
However, during the era of the living Rev. Moon, Unificationists tried to explain and justify the Unification teachings rationally and reasonably. The teachings fell squarely into the tried and true categories of theology, ideology, and philosophy with a strong moral emphasis.
Is that way of dealing with ‘truth’ an affront to some women? Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon professes now that we do not need to talk much in the old context of theology, ideology, and philosophy to justify our interpretations of experiences. We should just follow our ‘inner voice’ and believe what she tells us because she ‘knows’ intuitively. She resonates with God. Women have their ways, it seems. And intuition or ‘folk psychology’ is one of them. Korea is famous for its tradition of shamanism.
Folk psychology is, in effect, the mind’s natural, naive conception of itself. Unlike scientific psychology, folk psychology is independent of formal education. You grasp the essential features of folk psychology and have done so since early childhood. Folk psychology assumes the existence of a self – an ‘I’ that is the subject of thought and action. It assumes the existence of thoughts of various kinds – beliefs, desires and intentions. It assumes that we have voluntary control (‘free will’) over our actions, and that we are accountable for much of what we do. And it assumes that we are subjects of consciousness – creatures who undergo perceptual, emotional and bodily experiences.
Women Have Their Way
And so it may be: women have their way. And who says that their way is worse? Not me, I am sitting on the fence and let the dice fall as they may be. I mean, I am not convinced that men know it all by utilizing reason and science, that the male’s rational way is simply the better way. Did Immanuel Kant move people’s hearts and minds in the streets? The Rev. Moon was, I reckon, a very intuitive man. Being attuned to his God, as he said he was, he tantalized many followers with his ‘folk theology.’
His religion was one of strong morality. The notions of right and wrong, or ‘us versus them’ seem to have come to permeate the minds of many of his followers, even though the Rev. himself talked a lot about grace and forgiveness. True love, a softer version of moral right and wrong, is said to conquer all, but that phenomenon has seemingly not come to prominently inform some leaders and members of the Unification movement.
How do we know anything? We don’t, at least not with absolute certainty. The male’s or female’s ‘inner voice’ only infers; another simple word for that is intuition. A skeptic ‘knows’ that and does not fall for absolutes.
Without a God, there are only sentient people. Sentient humans all share an ‘ultimate concern‘ for meaning with each other. Some have personified that ultimate concern and call it God. So what. In my opinion, a shared ‘ultimate concern’ alone is probably enough of a prompt to motivate humans to cooperate and compete with respect. It has been a long road for humanity to get where we are now – advancing two steps forward and one step back, it seems. But overall, people have come to cooperate on a global scale and across religious borders. Can we keep going for another thousand years? I certainly do not know.
Recognition of Women
Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon also construes her claim to primacy in the context of male bias against women. She is making the point that women throughout history have not been listened to, and largely dismissed as meaningful participants in running the historical patriarchy. No, she is not claiming to start and run a matriarchy, only that women should be recognized as respected subjects, along with men, in the whole endeavor of human thriving.
I am sympathetic to that case. But, as always, the devil is in the details. Promoting the ascent of women in the patriarchy is fraud with perils for any woman. Few men would argue that the ascend of women should be suppressed, but most may wonder how far and fast it should be allowed to progress.
The proper recognition of women as equal counterparts with their unique capabilities has been and is a struggle for the ages. A true ‘Mother of Peace’ has a long road ahead of her.
Is It Hurting?
People of faith care about the motivations of people’s behaviors and actions. Pragmatists care about the consequences of people’s behaviors and actions. These are generalizations, I know. But it seems to me that it is good to avoid hurting people.
The ‘Peace Starts With Me’ movement encourages people to behave in resonance with their God as recognizable in their ‘inner voice.’ Consciousness, it is said, should guide us as it guides Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon. This is a process of behaving, learning, and growing into personal attunement with God during one’s youth. That condition is what paleolithic Adam and Eve, the first human ancestors, encountered. If they had reached that mature state of personal affairs, it would have been the fulfillment of their responsibility as embodying the biblical 1st. Blessing, that is to be fruitful.
“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Gen. 1:28
The message is that ordinary men and women of this day and age now should attend (emulate) the Rev. and Dr. Moon, who have become the ‘True Parents.’ There is no need to get sidetracked in studying classical theology or similar as a form of guidance. Building a deep internal connection with ‘True Parents’ will do.
True Enough
In general, I find that to be a passable proposition. Typically, children emulate their natural parents and learn from them anyway. So, why not add another set of role models to that mix, if not only as a backup? Does it matter if the additional set of parents calls themselves the ‘True Parents’ of mankind as long as they provide the ‘goods’ or ‘services’ for a young person to find a proper example to complement that of their natural parents, if necessary at all?
What if the ‘True Parents’ are not that ‘true,’ but simply true enough? Could that not work for the many people who have little or nothing to lose? I think so! People hang onto Moses, Jesus, Buddah, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, and even Taylor Swift. The list of celebrities is too long to include all. Why not add ‘True Parents’?
For the ‘Peace Starts With Me’ movement to succeed, it probably can benefit from not only commanding an astute understanding of God’s wants and needs, or rights and wrongs, but also from fostering an astute understanding of the quirky nature of the many ordinary Adams and Eves, that is, the entire human condition. Why is that important?
Mind / Body Problems
The ‘Peace Starts With Me’ slogan assumes that most people will notice a condition of mind/body disunity as a self-evident symptom of imperfection. However, Unification teachings fail to explain what mind/body disunity or unity is. What exactly constitutes mind/body unity, the foundation of coming to resonate with God? Disunity is often described as the mind going in one direction and the body going in another, end of the story. This proposition may appeal to simpletons.
But what is the mind as opposed to the body? Is there an innate contradiction within human nature, otherwise invented as ‘Original Sin’ or ‘Fallen Nature’ by St. Augustine? Something that ought to be resolved once and for all? Or are there not simply natural and diverse drives, instincts, and impulses operating competitively within the whole human being?
Meditation has been practiced for centuries by people as one of their survival tools to manage an unruly mind and/or body. Has any of these monks ever come down from their temples, relieved from their pains? Others have turned themselves in as sinners and found some resolve and peace in devotion to ‘Jesus on the Cross.’ One cannot talk to them without the chance of being condemned to Hell as unrepentant.
Diverse drives, instincts, impulses, desires, and needs operate competitively and cooperatively within the whole human being. There is nothing inherently wrong with the internal tensions that humans so often experience in their being.
Is it too busy in your mind? Yes, self-regulate your mind by meditation or prayer, reading a good book, going for a walk in nature. Is your body getting too aroused? Find your soulmate and make love. A healthy body will follow a healthy mind. Be at peace.
What Behavior
What is more troublesome are the tensions that emerge in the relations between individuals in groups and between groups of individuals and all of that. These tensions can and often do break out into nasty conflicts. Suffering from others-induced trauma is not a ‘sin’ and not a ‘fallen nature.’ Inducing trauma in another is a ‘sin’ or crime, but has little to do with the literal rise and fall of Adam and Eve other than that one can recognize behavioral patterns that seem to persist throughout the ages.
If I am not mistaken, the four ‘Fallen Natures’ as taught in the Unification movement are all forms of behavior.
For whatever reason, the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon could not get himself to entirely demystify the fictitious story of the rise and fall of Adam and Eve. The ‘Fall of Man’ narrative is an allegory with various interpretations at best, but its persistence as a literal event in the minds of the wary and damning contemplations of St. Augustine about sex has brought about a puritanistic morality that fails to properly serve mankind. It hurts.
The Golden Rule
Nevertheless, in collaboration with each other, humans are learning to manage universal growing pains by acting out normative moral behavior. Applying the Golden Rule goes a long way in this.
The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one would want to be treated by them. It is sometimes called an ethics of reciprocity, meaning that you should reciprocate to others how you would like them to treat you (not necessarily how they actually treat you). Various expressions of this rule can be found in the tenets of most religions and creeds through the ages.
‘Living for the sake of others’ is a version that the late Rev. Moon advocated for.
Who’s Responsibility
The latest lectures advise that fulfilling the 2nd. and 3rd. Blessing, that is to multiply and have dominion, is accomplished under the direct dominion of God. That puts the onus back on God as in: “If I am listening to my inner voice and perfectly resonate with you, my God, and all things regarding the 2nd. and 3rd. blessings do not work out too well, it is less of my responsibility.” Well, who’s responsibilities are we talking about now? Are we supposed to hold God responsible for bad things? Should we simply deflect the issue and do away with bad outcomes by labeling them as misfortunes and be done with it? Sort of let God off the hook?
When things went wrong for the Rev. Moon, he seemingly dealt with it by comforting God in what he said was God’s subsequent suffering. That may work for as long as there are ‘fallen’ people to be blamed, or even a ‘fallen’ angel. But that does not help humans to get over the ‘us versus them’ mentality and toward world peace.
Where Are The Men?
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon created a strong, obligation-based moral system with many strictures via his teachings. Living up to these normative demands seems to stress out some of its adherents, has caused severe fractures in the movement, and may not be that appealing to most ordinary folks who do not wish to have their hands tied up behind their backs.
Female members, the ‘weaker’ sex, may feel protected by and thus tolerate a moral system that aligns ‘salvation’ with marriage. But the males are no the run.
Strategies
Human societies and cultures have become extremely complex with individual and corporate relationships of all sorts intertwined across multiple domains, such as religion, ethnicity, race, gender, politics, wealth, and geography. Navigating this intricate network of relational dynamics is not for the faint of heart. Listening to one’s ‘inner voice’ or asking oneself the question “What would True Parents do?” will most likely not get one too far.
The ‘Mother of Peace’ seems to bank on the estimation that if people in the world would recognize her as the primary female caregiver of humankind, they would surely lay down their swords. That is a long shot in my opinion. I believe that the late Rev. Moon banked already in vain on that proposition.
Will someone get hurt? Who will get hurt?
But with an underserved Unification community at multiple breaking points to back up the ‘True Parents’ grandiose claims to primacy, their cause might be lost as I also do not experience their God to exercise direct dominion.
Many say that it is time to now assist the old members of the Unification community to heal their battle wounds and better prepare the young members to thrive as their inner voice sees fit.
