To see our Creator as Parent

Religious fundamentalism is a serious poison, as it can always be used to justify terrible atrocities -- murders, invasions, crusades.

The fundamentalist remains self-justified and filled with self-righteousness. Thus he can strap on a bomb and kill hundreds of idolaters in the name of God. Thus he can remain hateful, judgmental, spiteful, and vengeful. Imagine a world full of these kinds of peoples. That is not somewhere I would wish to be. This sounds more like a vision of hell than of heaven to me.

Religious conflict

On September 11, 2001, we all felt utter horror when the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City were destroyed by terrorists. Some people said this was the inevitable clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity. But my view is different. In their purest form, Islam and Christianity are not religions of conflict and confrontation. They both place importance on peace. In my view, it is bigoted to brand all Islam as radical, just as it is bigoted to say that Islam and Christianity are fundamentally different. The essence of religions is the same.

Common understanding

In 1984, I brought together forty religious scholars, instructing them to compare the teachings that appear in the sacred texts of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other major world religions. The book that resulted from their efforts was World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, published in 1991. What they found was that the sacred texts of religions convey the same or similar teachings more than 70 percent of the time. The remaining 30 percent are teachings that represent unique points of each religion. This means that most of the teachings of the major world religions are the same at their core. On the surface, some believers wear turbans, some wear prayer beads around their necks, others carry the cross, but they all seek the fundamental truths of the universe and try to understand the will of the Creator.
¨As peace loving citizen ¨ Rev. Moon

Fundamentalism has, as its central failure, the inability to see all humankind as brothers and sisters stemming from a common divine source. It sees only in terms of saved and dammed. The blasphemers will all be doomed to the fires of hell for eternity, some believe.

One Family under God

If this is so, think about what kind of God that would be. It would be quite a malevolent God. But Rev. Moon teaches that we cannot enter the Kingdom alone, but we must enter with our family -- our human family. He teaches of universal salvation that even Hitler, Stalin, even the devil, Satan have been forgiven in the vastness of Gods Love.