WHAT SCHOLARS SAY ABOUT HIM
Dr Frederick Sontag,
Professor of Philosopy, Pomona College, excerpted from his book Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church:An In-Depth Investigation of the Man and the Movement
In the course of this odyssey I did come to two firm conclusions:
(1) The origins of the movement are genuinely humble, religious and spiritual ( which many doubt)
(2) The adaptability and solidarity of the movement are such that we are dealing with a movement here to stay. We have witnessed in our own lifetime the birth, growing pains- and will see the maturity- of new religious movement.
What the movement has accomplished in a short time( thirty years) is rather phenomenal. From persecution and prison and a few converts, it began to grow in Seoul and moved to Japan, America, Europe and on to 120 mission countries…From poverty it has grown to be a business success that must make it one of the best-funded new religious movements….its numbers are small, certainly no more than 500,000 core members in all countries…whether positive or negative it has attracted worldwide attention. It is a growth and success story to make Horatio Alger and John D. Rockefeller glow with pride.”…
"I have tried, but cannot think of another new religious movement so genuinely international as the Unification Church. “
Tor Ragnar Gerholm
Professor of Physics, Emeritus University of Stockholm
Member of the Nobel Prize Awarding Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Reverend Moon is the Founder of ICUS – The International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences. The first meeting took place in New York in November 1972. Since then thousands of scientists and scholars from all over the world have attended the various ICUS meetings organized on three continents.
Right from the beginning the Founding Father has insisted that ICUS should focus on two themes: The Unity of the Sciences and Absolute Values. To the average scientist the former is abstruse, the latter absurd. From the beginning Reverend Moon was a controversial man.
Reverend Moon was right in insisting upon Unity. A Unity that should be understood in a spiritual rather than in a technical sense. A feeling of unification in working for a common cause in harmony and in discipline and with respect for one another.In my opinion Reverand Moon was also right in insisting upon absolute values as a recurrent theme for ICUS.
Obviously Reverend Moon has taken a firm stand on matters that are currently at the center of the debate on the social impact of science and technology, on the materialism of the West vs. the mysticism of the East, on social progress and welfare, vs existential needs and religious inspiration. No wonder he is a controversial man.But he is not a man of controversy .On the contrary he has devoted his life to unification and unity. The Unification Movement, of which Reverend Moon is the founder and the spiritual leader, is dedicated to bringing the people of the earth and their religious beliefs together into harmony and peace.
Kailash Puri, London
Fellow of the Royal Society of Art
"I can say categorically that Rev. Moon has been misunderstood. The activities and organizations he has started prove to me that he is a man dedicated to bringing faith communities together to reconcile."
Dr. Hang Nyung Lee
Former President of Hong Ik University, Korea
Reverend Sun Myung Moon accomplished numerous feats, but out of them, if I choose three remarkable things, the first is to find God again, the second is to find love again, and the third is to find the family again. Reverend Moon as an individual achieved numerous and miraculous feats within a short period of a few decades Through the blessing, Rev. Moon is going to establish the whole world to be the community of love by the restored families. He is developing the third revolution for peace not by force or money, but by love.
Profesor Hisayoshi Watanabe,
University of ?, Japan
Unification Church's central dogma that God is living and working at this moment and that He cannot achieve His end without human help, seems to me a great idea not only in itself but also because it supports the logical consequence of all philosophers so far presented.
The ultimate meaning of human responsibility, that is, of morality and ethics, cannot be grasped until we have conceived the nature and position of God as expounded in the Divine Principle. What I admire in my Unificationist friends is their sense of responsibility-responsibility to their own selves, to others, to the world, and ultimately to God.This spiritually friendly atmosphere pervading Unificationist circles, which I have intimately perceived during these dozen years, has affected me enough to believe that it is absolutely necessary to expand it far outside the circles to the general public, without particularly meaning religious propagation. Certainly behind all this is felt the presence of Rev. Moon, but it is only felt.What I most admire is their selfless zeal to realize high common ideals. Without exception my Unificationist friends have a high sense of duty-not duty imposed by others but self-imposed, which accounts for their pride. Another thing I wonder at about my Unificationist friends is their mutual respect…This is also what I had not known before I got to know them...
It seems to me that by meeting my Unificationist friends what had been sleeping in me was awoken. To be sure, it was my renaissance, and ever since I have felt more sure of myself, as a man, as a teacher, as a scholar and writer; for I feel I have had a backbone planted in me, though not all at once but with time. My impression at the earlier stage was simply surprise and wonder at the existence of such a fine group of young people as I had pictured only in my imagination.
Not that I had no difficulty in understanding the Principle; it certainly took some time before I could fully bring myself in tune with it, partly because I was at that time more sympathetic with Buddhist than Christian thoughts, and also because of my old delusion that to be a scholar one must be an atheist. But here is a good instance of the fact that education is a matter of amalgamation of things taught and the one who teaches: I could never tire of listening to my young teachers lecturing to me with cool enthusiasm.
