Sun Myung Moon dies at 92; Washington Times owner led the Unification Church

Washington Post ^ | 09/02/2012 | By Emma Brown

[SeekAndFind]

Sun Myung Moon, a self-professed messiah who claimed millions of religious followers in his Unification Church and sought to become a powerful voice in the American conservative movement through business interests that included the Washington Times, has died. He was 92.

The Washington Times reported that Mr. Moon died in South Korea early Monday morning (Sunday afternoon in Washington). Unification Church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul told the Associated Press that Mr. Moon died at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong, northeast of Seoul. He had been under treatment for pneumonia.

Mr. Moon, the son of Korean farmers, created a sprawling empire at the intersection of religion and business and became one of the world’s most enigmatic and polarizing public figures.

His stated ambition was to rule the world and replace Christianity with his own faith, which blended elements of Christianity, Confucianism and Korean folk religions. A leading symbol of the 1970s cult wars in America, he attracted a great deal of attention and ridicule for holding mass weddings for Unificationist couples whom he had paired, often without the prospective partners ever having met.

But his success in business and involvement in American politics “demanded that people who could care less about his peculiar doctrinal views pay attention to him,” said James Beverley, a professor at Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto who has studied Mr. Moon’s church since the late 1970s.

As a young man, Mr. Moon was twice jailed in the 1940s when his sermonizing attracted the attention of authorities in what is now North Korea. Emerging as a staunch anti-communist, he built the foundations of what became a global business network with labor provided by his devotees.

He made his most strident inroads into American culture in the 1970s.

[fishtank]

False prophets don't deserve an RIP.

[fella]

And you don't see the hand of our Creator in that coincidence happen centuries in the making?

[Cronos]

Nope, English is just one language among many — it’s the most widespread, but it will be replaced sometime, probably by a language one wouldn’t even guess yet just as Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian replaced by Aramaic, or it may be replaced by dialects (American?) just as Latin broke into its dialects which became languages in their own right

[Cronos]

I don’t know about Joel Osteen and a false prophet — NOTE: I’ve hardly watched a few minutes of him — but he seems to preach next to nothing, just catch phrases. So neither here nor there.