The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1984
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The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1984 |
I welcome you all. Although I am in prison in Danbury, more and more Christian leaders are coming to support us. Korea, the location of this conference, is the country in which I dedicated my youth to God's providence.
I appreciate your hard work. I know all you have done to fight evil, such as the rallies in West Berlin, and so on.
The precursor of CARP, called the Seunghwa Christian Student Association, was created on December 31, 1954. In the early 1960s, its name was changed to CARP. The first nationwide CARP organizations appeared in Japan and Korea in the mid-1960s. Now we have CARP organizations in more than 70 countries.
The first motivation which impelled me to create CARP came from the fact that most college students are young. They do not depend on their past, but live for the future. They admire righteousness and long for truth and beauty. Their minds have the most appropriate foundation for receiving God's message.
My second motivation was my realization that God's ultimate providence should not be restricted to Christianity and its denominations. God's ideal should be fulfilled in every aspect of culture. For this purpose, God's will should be introduced to college students as the new inheritors of culture. This task is more urgent now than at any other time, in view of the rise of communism.
My final motivation for creating CARP was to overcome the confusion which prevailed in the aftermath of the world wars. Today we know that traditional value systems are losing their effectiveness, but we have no new value system that can cope with contemporary world problems. At this point in time, God wants to offer the ultimate value system.
Both God and humankind hope to build a unified ideal world of peace. Before this can be accomplished, there should be a unified ideal nation. Before the nation, there should be a unified ideal tribe, which should be preceded by a unified ideal family. Ultimately, however, without an ideal individual, we cannot have such a family. The Messiah is such an individual. The ideal world should transcend ideal nations; it should be multinational, multiracial, and multi-religious.
What is the reality of the world now? Individualism prevails. The computer is becoming the master of its inventor. Broken families are everywhere. Religious conflicts are everywhere. Drugs, gambling, wars, atheism, and communism -- these are the realities of today.
Why is it that the traditional value systems have lost their efficacy? It is because religions, at their basis of understanding, could not prove the existence of God or know God clearly. Hence, they could not clearly answer the ultimate questions about life and the universe. As religions lost their traditional authority, materialism seemed to offer the only reliable way of perceiving reality. Dehumanization then followed. We need a new, true value system as a way out of this suffocating situation. This new value system should be based on the Ultimate Being. Also, we know what problems this new value system should be able to solve in today's world.
CARP members are the vanguard in the march towards the new world that everyone desires to reach. They are the inheritors of our internal and external tradition. The CARP movement is not aiming at temporary solutions to the realities of this time, but at remaking everything from the beginning.
God does not need your external appearance or your knowledge. God needs yourselves: your minds, your willpower, and your devotion. At every turning point in history, young people came forth to make a breakthrough. Look at young Gautama and young Jesus. I also started my public ministry in my mid-20s.
God is asking all of you to dedicate your youth to the greatest cause. You are now in command of the steering wheel of a ship that 4 billion people will board. Let us be the flag-bearers in the creation of the new culture in the dawning of the new age. Thank you.