Section On Craig MaximSection On X-MembersSection On Sun Myung MoonSection On The Unification ChurchSection On Divine Principle TheologyAt-A-Glance Information On All TopicsSite-Map of Links to every page on this site

Click Here To Return To The Main PageCLick The X To Return To Main Page

SEARCH:

TOPICS


 

SEND CRAIG MAIL!
Your Email:

Select Purpose:

Comments:

 

Go To The X-Moonies Store Now!
In association with Amazon.com

Featured Book:
Buy It Now!
Buy-It-Now 30% Off

In The Shadow Of The Moons -The Daughter in Law of Sun Myung Moon exposes her life as a victim of abuse in the Moon family, and how she escaped with her children to find freedom and a new life.

Enter The Store!

All Products
Books
Pop Music
Classical Music
Videos
Toys
Consumer Electronics
Home Improvement

Search by keywords:

In Association with Amazon.com

 

X-MOONIES MAILING LIST!
Enter your email address below,
then click the 'Join List' button:



Powered by ListBot

Click Here!


Rev. Moon's African Son?
Violence and Abuse in the Name of God

Rev. Moon's African Son from Zimbabwe? ~The alleged "incarnation" of the spirit of Sun Myung Moon's deceased son, Heung Jin Moon, into a Zimbabwean member named Cleopas Kundioni, is a bizarre event in the history of the Unification movement, and undoubtedly, one of it's most shameful. While most unificationists seek to bury the memory, if not the facts, of these events, the abuses and incredible violence inflicted upon the members of the Unification Church will not easily be erased, nor forgotten. Indeed, aside from the emotional traumas of this shameful episode, there are some members that are still dealing with the psychological and physical punishments received in the name of God.


Reincarnation or "Incarnation"?

As Unificationists will tell you, they do not believe in Reincarnation. Moon holds that people are not reincarnated after death, but...they can return in other ways. One of those ways, is in the form of an Incarnation. Incarnation is similar to reincarnation in the sense that a deceased person regains a physical body to use, and can perform all functions and operate in the physical plane, just as he had before he died. Where it is different, is that the new "body" the incarnated spirit uses, is not his own, but borrowed from someone living. It is a spiritual possession of someone else's body. The deceased spirit temporarily uses, presumably with permission, the body of someone who is living. It is claimed that the "incarnation" or spiritual possession of a living person's body can be quite fleeting, or can last many years, depending upon the level of commitment of the spirit being, and the importance of the mission the spirit person seeks to accomplish while using the body of the living.

This unusual theology took on huge significance however in 1987, when a Unification Church member from Zimbabwe claimed to be the incarnation of Moon's deceased son Heung Jin Moon. Rev. Moon's young son had wrecked his sports car, crashing into a semi-truck in a fatal accident after "a night on the town.", according to Nansook Hong's book: In The Shadow Of The Moons. Moon claims to have pulled the plug himself on his son's life support system, terminating his life and creating a "sacrifice" for God, made necessary Moon claimed, by the failure of the church members to fulfill their own responsibilities to Moon and to God. Moon claimed that his son's car accident was every bit as meaningful a sacrifice as Jesus' crucifixion on the cross. In fact, shortly after, a hastily arranged ceremony was held where Moon claimed that the dead Heung Jin was now Lord of the Spiritual World and that Jesus himself now bowed down to Moon's son in the spiritual world and served him there.


Moon Accepts the African as His Dead Son

In September of 1987, Rev. Kwak, a high ranking official in the Unification Church, declared that an African brother was now the "embodiment" of Heung Jin Moon, "24 hours a day". It was Kwak who Moon had first sent to Zimbabwe to investigate the rumors of the incarnation and to determine whether the African was really Moon's son or not. We were told that Rev. Moon had given Rev. Kwak a list of questions to ask the Zimbabwean. Whatever those questions were, the African passed with flying colors. One question that possibly no member has ever asked himself however, is that if Moon is really the King of the Spiritual World, and can freely converse with everyone in the spiritual world who has ever died, as he claims he can, then why would Moon have to purchase a plane ticket to Africa and send a very physical list of questions that a church leader would deliver personally? This process consumed days. Why did Moon not merely ask his son in the spiritual world whether he was incarnating into an African or not? That would certainly have been faster and cheaper than a long airplane trip to another continent, wouldn't it have been? But due to a very real loss of ability to criticize or question their master, Rev. Moon, questions like these are rarely considered.

After passing the initial interview, the Black Heung Jin who was also called by various other titles, including: "Black Heung Jin", "African Heung Jin" and "The African Hurricane", was brought to America to meet with Moon and his family. These "tests" he also passed, and was then sanctioned as Moon's son, and given instructions to travel throughout the world addressing Unification Church members and hearing their most private sins in confessions, where sometimes violent punishment was meted out to them. The African was so accepted into the movement as a leader and church authority, that he gave sermons to the members, instructed them on their sex lives, arranged adoptions within the group for childless couples, heard confessions, forgave sins, ordered punishments and officiated church events along with Moon's "other" children.

Enduring violence of her own with an abusive husband who was Moon's eldest son and heir apparent, Nansook later escaped and divorced Moon's son, writing a revealing book about her life married to Moon's eldest son. In that book, she wrote about the Heung Jin phenomenon, and when the True Family (Moon's Family) first interviewed the Zimbabwean:

Excerpt from:

"In The Shadow of The Moons"
by Nansook Hong

Pg. 151-153

The Reverend Moon was thrilled with the news from Africa. The Unification Church had been concentrating its recruitment efforts in Latin America and Africa. Clearly a Black Heung Jin could not hurt the cause. Without even meeting the man who claimed to be possessed by the spirit of his dead child, Sun Myung Moon authorized the Black Heung Jin to travel the world, preaching and hearing the confessions of The Unification Church members who had gone astray.

Confessions soon became central to the Black Heung Jin's mission. He went to Europe, to Korea, to Japan, everywhere administering beatings to those who had violated church teachings by using alcohol and drugs or engaging in premarital sex. The Black Heung Jin spent a year on the road, dispensing physical punishment as penance for those who wished to repent, before Sun Myung Moon summoned him to East Garden.

We all gathered to greet him at Father's breakfast table. He was a thin black man of average height who spoke English better than Sun Myung Moon. He seemed to me intent on charming the True Family, in much the way a snake encircles and then swallows its prey. I was anxious to hear some concrete evidence that this man possessed the spirit of the boy I once knew. I was not to hear it. The Reverend Moon asked him standard theological questions that any member who had studied the Divine Principle could have answered. He offered no startling revelations or religious insights. Maybe what most impressed Father was his ability to quote from the speeches of Sun Myung Moon.

The Reverend and Mrs. Moon suggested that we children meet with the Black Heung Jin privately and report back to them on our impressions. It was an amazing meeting. Hyun Jin, Kook Jin, and Hyo Jin kept asking the stranger questions about their childhood. He could not answer any of them. He did not remember anything about his life on Earth, he told us. Instead of inspiring skepticism, the Black Heung Jin's convenient memory lapse was interpreted as a sign of his having left earthly concerns behind when he entered the Kingdom of Heaven. Everyone in the household embraced him and called him by their dead brother's name. I avoided him and found myself thinking that I was living with either the stupidest or the most gullible people on earth. There was a third alternative I did not consider at the time: the Reverend Moon was using the Black Heung Jin for his own ends, just as he had used the American civil liberties community before him.

Sun Myung Moon seemed to take pleasure in the reports that filtered back to East Garden of the beatings being administered by the Black Heung Jin. He would laugh raucously if someone out of favor had been dealt an especially hard blow. No one outside the True Family was immune from the beatings. Leaders around the world tried to use their influence to be exempted from the Black Heung Jin's confessional. My own father appealed in vain to the Reverend Kwak to avoid having to attend such a session.

The Black Heung Jin was a passing phenomenon in the Unification Church. Soon the mistresses he acquired were so numerous and the beatings he administered so severe that members began to complain. Mrs. Moon's maid, Won Ju McDevitt, a Korean who married an American church member, appeared one morning with a blackened eye and covered with purple bruises. The Black Heung Jin had beaten her with a chair. He beat Bo Hi Pak --- a man in his sixties --- so badly that he was hospitalized for a week in Georgetown Hospital. He told doctors he had fallen down a flight of stairs. He later needed surgery to repair a blood vessel in his head.

Sun Myung Moon knew when to cut his losses. When you are the Messiah, it is easy to make a course correction. Once it became clear that he had to disassociate himself from the violence he had let loose on the membership, Sun Myung Moon simply announced that Heung Jin's spirit had left the Zimbabwean's body and ascended into Heaven. The Zimbabwean was not quite so ready to get off the gravy train. At last sighting, he had established a breakaway cult in Africa with himself in the role of Messiah.

After the various interviews, Sun Myung Moon, according to Rev. Kwak accepted the African "completely as his own son." Thus began a career that would last more than one full year. Cleopas would intimidate and sometimes violently beat the members after hearing their confessions. According to one highly place Unification Church member, in Washington D.C., when Cleopas, or "Heung Jin", came for confessions, the church doors were locked behind the members and some were handcuffed to radiators to prevent them from escaping the beatings. Churches are usually considered a refuge or sanctuary from evil and from harm. But in the Unification Church, one church in Washington D.C., in fact, the very church I attended as a Unificationist, had become a prison, trapping members within it's limestone block walls where they were humiliated, handcuffed and brutally beaten, some requiring hospitalization for as long as a week. Everywhere Moon's African "son" went, violence was unleashed upon the members. Some suffered broken noses. Others, even women, had chairs thrown at them or were beaten and marked with bruises. Seemingly no one was exempt from the violence, as even Moon's loyal lieutenant and long time translator Bo Hi Pak, required open brain surgery and was said to have suffered permanent brain damage as a result of his own beating.

Former Washington Times editor William P. Cheshire's remarks on the "Black Heung Jin" to San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 1989

"Where the Moonies are concerned, it seems clear, we are dealing with something be-sides just an exotic cult. The Pak beating smacks strongly of Jonestown. And with Moon lavishing hundreds of millions of dollar a year on newspapers, magazines and political-action groups in this country and abroad, such occult and aggressive practices give rise to secular apprehensions. If the 'reincarnation' doesn't rock those conservative shops that have been taking money from Moon, not even fire-breathing dragons would disturb them."

- William P. Cheshire

It is events such as these that must make each of us ever vigilant as even now, Sun Myung Moon prepares his members for what they call a potential Mass Immigration to Brazil, where Moon is constructing what they are calling a Garden of Eden in an isolated region of South America. Can we learn nothing from the history of cult violence? One need not look as far back as Jim Jones and the suicide/murders of 900 men, women and children in another isolated region of South America in the 70's. We are aware of what is possible in cults with leaders who possess absolute control over their followers. But we can look in the papers of today for more recent tragedies, each a warning, calling us to action and awareness over the potential for further and even worse tragedies. Very recently, as many as 1000 cult members in Uganda were murdered. Burned to death by their own leaders. Like the Unificationists, they had been locked in their own churches, prevented from escaping the punishment inflicted upon them by their own church leaders. If a Unification church member can be locked in his own church, handcuffed to radiators in his own sanctuary, imprisoned in what should be a religious refuge, so that he can be beaten violently without being able to escape....if that is possible in our nation's capital...what in Heaven's name, is possible if Moon succeeds in relocating these followers to an isolated region of South America?

The unchecked violence of the Heung Jin phenomenon in the Unification Church is a warning. In describing the violence and abuses that occurred, one leader within the Unification Church has called for an admittance of guilt, of wrong-doing, even on the part of Sun Myung Moon, who oversaw this shameful episode in his own movement. But as brave as that call was, coming from a current member, it has fallen on deaf ears. As the messiah, Moon is above reproach. He need not answer to man, nor to man's laws. There will be no apology from the self-proclaimed messiah. It is beyond me, how a man could so abuse his followers, even laughing at their brutal beatings, as Nansook Hong described witnessing with her own eyes, that this man could do this to people who have sacrificed their entire lives, their futures, their families and relatives, in complete service and obedience to Moon...it is unconscionable. What kind of psychopathic personality could be so unfeeling? So unmoved. So withdrawn and unconcerned about something that was within his power to prevent? We must pray with all our hearts to God in Heaven, that Sun Myung Moon is not successful in convincing his followers to emigrate with him to his Garden of Eden. It will certainly be no more a real Heaven on Earth, than Moon's churches have been real sanctuaries for his followers. Instead, the Unificationist's heaven on earth in South America, could instead become a literal hell, a grave of bodies, each one a testimony to the dangers of absolute obedience to controlling cult leaders and their sometimes violent wills. It has happened before. It will happen again. Rather than shake our heads, let's speak out, let's warn others, let's make an effort so that even one member may turn away from a potentially violent end.

In closing this article, I leave you with the words and images of a current member, describing the violence, his fellow members endured at the hands of Moon's "incarnated" son:

Excerpted from:

Black Heung Jin - The Victory of (All You Need Is) Love
by Dan Fefferman

http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/feffermn/fefferman%2Dblack%2Dheungjin.htm

The use of violence by the African "Heung Jin" was defended by some Church leaders as equivalent to acts of penance and contrition in the Catholic Church. This rationalization may have had merit, if all we were talking of were a slap on the face and the imposition of conditions of fasting and prayer -- and in most cases, that's all it was. But in other cases -- not just isolated cases, but nearly everywhere this African Heung Jin preached -- acts of serious violence were carried out.

In Washington, D.C. the Church's doors were locked to prevent people from leaving. Members, both men and women, were handcuffed to radiators. Several were beaten strongly, not just slapped. In Barrytown, one member's nose was broken; another was sent to the hospital with broken ribs. In New York, a member was beaten so severely that he spent a week in the hospital with severe head and body injuries, and later required surgery. In Japan, several more members were sent to the hospital. "Heung Jin" also walked around armed with a pistol and threatened severe punishment, including death (to be executed by God, not himself) for those who failed to unite with him.

I realize the use of violence has been condoned even lately, by Church leaders. Rev. Moon's living son Hyun Jin, for example, states that:

'When Heung Jin Nim came in the black brother's body, you thought, "that can't be Heung Jin Nim." And some of you were upset about him beating you... If I got hit by Heung Jin Nim, I would say "great." Physical pain will go away. But the failures you have in life could stay with you for eternity." '(3)

The fact remains that if the principle of institutionalized violence -- even in the name of True Love -- is left unchallenged, we are leaving a very dangerous precedent for future generations. The violence which the African "Heung Jin" did to the members of the Unification Church is a blot on Rev. Moon's record which can only be erased, in my opinion, by a frank recognition by the True Family that it was wrong -- if not in principle at least in the actual degree to which it was carried out.

      "Sun Myung Moon seemed to take pleasure in the reports that filtered back to East Garden of the beatings being administered by the Black Heung Jin. He would laugh raucously if someone out of favor had been dealt an especially hard blow."

- Nansook Hong

 

 

STRANGE BUT TRUE - SECTION

Moon & Houdini
Moon's African Son?
Moon's "Spiritual" Mistresses
Moonie Science
Satan Joins The Moonies
Moon Marries Jesus, and Hitler and...

 

Click To Return To Main Page
HOME

Legal Information Concerning Contents of www.xmoonies.com

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1