Sun Myung Moon, religious leader, died at 92

  Dead Famous

Dead, Sun Myung Moon on the 3rd of September 2012, he was a Korean religious leader, businessperson, political activist, and media mogul.

Moon was born on the 25th of February 1920 in what is now North Korea.

When he was a child, his family converted to Christianity. After graduation from the sodang in 1938, Moon planned to become a teacher, and applied to the Normal School in Pyeongyang, but was rejected because he was colour-blind.

Instead, he travelled south to Seoul and entered the Kyeongsong Institute of Commerce and Industry, founded a few years earlier as part of the Japanese educational system installed in Korea by the Japanese government.

In 1947 he was convicted by the North Korean government of spying for South Korea and given a five-year sentence to the HÅ­ngnam labor camp.

In 1954, he founded the Unification Church in Seoul, South Korea based on conservative, family-oriented teachings from new interpretations of the Bible.

Moon has been criticized for rejecting the mainline Christian doctrines of salvation by faith alone, the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth of Jesus, the necessity of the crucifixion of Jesus, a literal resurrection of Jesus, a literal second coming of Jesus, and for the assertion that Jesus should have married.

In the 1982 case United States v. Sun Myung Moon he was charged by the United States government with willfully filing false federal income tax returns, found guilty in a jury trial, and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.

His case generated protests from clergy and civil libertarians.

Moon founded and supported dozens of organizations to advance international understanding and build lasting peace in the world.

A long-time opponent of totalitarian communism, Moon developed a systematic ideological critique and counterproposal to communism, which he propagated through the world in the 1970s and 1980s and which strengthened the resolve of anti-communist elements in numerous front-line states.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, he was an ardent supporter of reconstruction in post-communist societies and invested heavily in the development of North Korea.

Other examples of his diverse humanitarian efforts include founding The Little Angels children’s dance troupe as Korean cultural ambassadors, developing fish-based protein supplement to fight hunger and malnutrition, organizing numerous interfaith conferences to foster cooperation among religions, proposing the establishment an inter-religious council at the United Nations, and advocating a tunnel across the Bering Strait to unite the world’s nations by an international highway.

In the English speaking world, Sun Myung Moon is often referred to as “Reverend Moon,” both by Unification Church members, and by the general public and the media.

Unification Church members most often call him “Father” or “True Father.” Some mainstream Christian clergy who have come to associate themselves with the Unification Movement took to calling him “Father Moon.”

Reverend Moon’s teaching gives highest regard for the family, which he calls the natural “school of love.”

God’s love is expressed in the give and take of male and female.

God created men and women to join together in marriage and create families in which we acquire the fullness of love and goodness.

This is what Unification teaches regarding the Biblical second blessing. Children are meant to receive love from their parents-their food, warmth and care, and children naturally return love and joy to their parents in different ways as they grow from little infants all the way to old age.

Siblings’ love has the same eternal quality as does conjugal love and parental love.

This the universal, eternal, ever dynamic and creative quality of family life-what Reverend Moon calls the “Four Realms of Heart.”