Dr. Ben's comments on Sun Myung Moon

For many years I was able to dismiss most of what was written in the press because I thought small errors and a negative emotional tone and exaggerations in the writing, as well as clear evidence that they didn’t understand certain things as well as an insider like myself. In retrospect, maybe I should have had the ability to subtract those things out and look at the remaining facts objectively. In my defense, almost all of the most damning information has come out publicly in the last 15 or so years. On the other hand, if the idea that your side is right is unassailable, you’re willing to explain away an awful lot of inconvenient facts.

This article is pretty much factual, not particularly emotional, and not hyperbolic like many “negative” articles, but I wonder how many of the current members are willing to forgive whatever objections they might have and look beyond to honestly consider the facts.

If you’re a member, even though it’s natural for you to be defensive, and not your habit to overlook small errors or an undertone of disapproval, please try to read this article objectively and look squarely at the facts. At the very least, I think you’ll agree that the UC has a very severe PR problem that interferes in a huge way with accomplishing your goals, and that part of the reason for this is the way things have been done in the UC.

howwelldoyouknowyourmoon:

By Harold Paine and Birgit Gratzer

November 2001

I. Introduction
The organization of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is seeking a major role in the NGO community at the United Nations. Three Moon groups have been granted formal NGO status and others have applied. The Moon organization has used the UN for conferences and for publicity events. Moon has held a mass-wedding in a UN conference room. A new Moon-sponsored “umbrella group,” known as the World Association of NGOs (WANGO), proposes itself as an authentic voice of the NGO community.
The Moon organization (1) commands considerable financial resources. It has held lavish conferences, with participants from many countries. A number of government missions have lent their support. Dozens of well-known scholars, NGO representatives, politicians and diplomats have unwittingly taken part.
At a time when many are asking questions about who NGOs represent and what role they should have in global governance, we must carefully examine this newcomer, especially since it lays claim to broad international legitimacy. (2)
The Moon organization, as we shall show, is a strange admixture of religion, politics and business. It has confounded tax and oversight authorities by doing much of its financial transactions in cash and by using the mantle of religious freedom to shield itself from scrutiny. (3)
Before turning to details about Moon activities at the UN, we will review general information from public sources about the Moon organization and its operating methods. We draw on many major media, books and journal articles, a report of the US Congress and extensive web-based information, as well as Moon publications and web sites. In the subsequent report about the Moon organization at the UN, we also draw on a number of interviews as well as primary documents.

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Following is a list of selected cognitive biases with brief descriptions, from Wikipedia. I chose the entries below from a much longer list, based on which ones I thought were more common among Unification Church (U.C.) members than among the people I usually interact with these days (a good cross section of Americans, perhaps a bit more intelligent and educated than the average American, but so were the American U.C. members in the 70s, 80s, and 90s). I think there are two main reasons for greater bias among members.

First, members have been asked to believe some things that are not rational, and this has actually increased over the years. (Think back to “Black Heung Jin Nim,” then the Cheongpyeong teachings, then some of the things Sun Myung Moon said in recent years. Should I also include Kook Jin’s “Hyun Jin is Satan”?) Other groups that impose beliefs on people also tend to increase bias and irrationality. So the U.C. is not alone.

Second, this is partly a cultural phenomenon. In the 1980s Sun Myung Moon put Koreans in positions of authority over American leaders who were better educated than those Koreans. Traditional Korean culture is more subject to superstitious beliefs than contemporary American culture anyway, but the education gap magnified this effect. It was further compounded by a church culture in which people strove to be more “spiritual” and “heartistic” (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=609899047084&set=o.243160755806652&type=1&theater) and less “intellectual.”

A small number of the biases below were exemplified by Sun Myung Moon himself and adopted only by some members, but almost all the biases below are more likely to be more pronounced in members because of Unification culture, which draws much of its inspiration from old, pre-scientific cultural traditions.

The irony is that the Divine Principle pays lip service to the value of modern, scientific thinking in teaching that the “Abel-type” enlightenment helped bring culture to a higher level, a “merit of the age.” Also, from the Divine Principle: “Knowledge comes from cognition, and man cannot today cognize anything which lacks logic and scientific proof. To understand something, there must first be cognition. Thus internal truth (religion) also requires logical proof.” (p. 9).

Decision-making, belief and behavioral biases

Attentional bias – the tendency to pay attention to emotionally dominant stimuli in one’s environment and to neglect relevant data, when making judgments of a correlation or association.

Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).

Backfire effect – when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.

Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.

Belief bias – an effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information or memories in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.

Congruence bias – the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.

Essentialism – categorizing people and things according to their essential nature, in spite of variations.

Expectation bias – the tendency to believe data that agree with expectations, and to disbelieve or downgrade the corresponding importance of data that appear to conflict with those expectations.

Functional fixedness - limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.

Focusing effect – the tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

Framing effect – drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how or by whom that information is presented.

Hindsight bias – sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened. Colloquially referred to as “Hindsight is 20/20.”

Hostile media effect – the tendency to see a media report as being biased, owing to one’s own strong partisan views.

Illusion of control – the tendency to overestimate one’s degree of influence over other external events.

Illusion of validity – when consistent but predictively weak data leads to confident predictions.

Illusory correlation – inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.

Irrational escalation – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.

Just-world hypothesis – the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).

Loss aversion – “the disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.” (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).

Mere exposure effect – the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.

Optimism bias – the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).

Ostrich effect – ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.

Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Overconfidence effect – excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.

Pareidolia – a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Planning fallacy – the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.

Reactive devaluation – devaluing proposals that purportedly originated with an adversary.

Semmelweis reflex – the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.

Subjective validation – perception that something is true if a subject’s belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.

Texas sharpshooter fallacy - pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern.

Social biases

Group attribution error – the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.

Halo effect – the tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one area of their personality to another in others’ perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).

Illusion of external agency – when people view self-generated preferences as instead being caused by insightful, effective and benevolent agents.

Illusory superiority – overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as “Lake Wobegon effect,” “better-than-average effect,” or “superiority bias”).

Ingroup bias – the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.

Just-world phenomenon – the tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people “get what they deserve.”

Moral luck – the tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event rather than the intention.

Naive cynicism – expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.

Self-serving/group-serving bias – a tendency for group members to make more internal (dispositional) attributes for events that reflect positively on the group and more external (situational) attributes for events that reflect negatively on the group.

System justification – the tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.

Memory errors and biases

Choice-supportive bias: remembering chosen options as having been better than rejected options.

Illusion-of-truth effect: that people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.

Illusory correlation – inaccurately remembering a relationship between two events.

Self-serving bias – perceiving oneself responsible for desirable outcomes but not responsible for undesirable ones.


For the complete list, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases.

It’s easier to think that Sun Myung Moon’s accomplishments are valuable if you explain away all the contradictions as having “deep providential meaning,” and spiritualize all the results. Sammy Pak was conceived because “Father needed 12 sons.” “Father paid all the indemnity” through going fishing and going to Las Vegas, and giving everything (mostly speeches and orders), and now the “foundation is laid” and the “spiritual victory” has been achieved. Let’s have a ceremony and declare a new holy day.

What about the fact that the Unification “movement” is still just a small, marginalized group with PR on par with the Nazis or the KKK, you say? “No freedom without ACTUAL results,” you say? (Divine Principle http://www.unification.net/dp73/dp73-1-2.html). Well, um, er—be patient; just give it some more time. Just because the Kingdom of Heaven is already “established” doesn’t mean you should be able to tell. Spiritual results are invisible!

Comments on tumblr.com forums recently seem to question whether some people are overly concerned with Sun Myung Moon’s sex life. 

1. SMM teaches that the original sin that caused the fall of humanity was a misuse of sexual love.

2. SMM teaches that he is a true man who does not make mistakes in this area.

3. SMM teaches that he is a true parent who has created a true family, and that he brings a true solution for all humanity for the misuses and mistakes made in the area of sexual love.

It is of CENTRAL IMPORTANCE whether SMM has made mistakes or misuses in the area of sexual love, for anyone who is at all open to trying to evaluate whether the “true family” is really true and whether the solution he brings is really true.

Most members are not open to making such an evaluation any more. Of course they might acknowledge the most flagrant sins of the “true” children (and have a convoluted explanation for how that could be), but they don’t allow themselves even to question whether SMM might have been wrong on these central issues. They’ve developed a defensive, foreclosed mindset.

Given the fact that older members who know about some of SMM’s sexual behavior but undeniably take active steps to hide it from the rank-and-file members, those who are open to the facts should certainly seek them out.

And given the central importance of SMM’s sexual behavior to the question of whether he really is the person with the solution to sexual irregularities, the claim that some people are overly concerned with Sun Myung Moon’s sex life seems like a good candidate to win the prize for the most ridiculous and ironic statement in the short history of the Unification group.

Yes, there are other good candidates….

In a recent discussion involving the Unification Church, the idea of a “REBOOT” of the messianic concept came up:

Serious philosophers know that methodology is central and foundational (unlike Unification Thought, where it’s just tacked on at the end). No methodology has come even remotely close to that of science in terms of being obviously and wildly successful. On the level of “thought,” science is the new messiah.

Let’s also keep the Unificationist idea that each person is to be a messiah: each person liberates him or herself through growth, education, maturity, compassion, acts of kindness, etc.  Scientific thinking, game theory support of cooperation, democratic approaches, and the logic of reciprocity and benevolence lead to individual enlightenment and the flourishing of groups and society.

A third aspect of the reboot of the messianic concept: crowdsourcing and cooperative distributed intelligence, which has only just begun to be applied to a small minority of aspects of our lives, but has the potential to impact so many more. It’s the logical next step after democratization (that even the Principle acknowledges in the “Last 400 years” chapter), not a return to a monarchic model.

Some courage will be needed to let go of old-fashioned ideas that crumble under the weight of undeniable accumulated evidence.

The post below was written a year ago, so there would certainly be some additional things the author would no doubt express gratitude for now, but it still seems timely, as well as touching that he found the silver lining in the cloud. The style is not for everyone, but it seemed worth linking to during this season of giving thanks.

What I am grateful for this Thanksgiving

I am grateful that True Parents and the True Family are making the truth known to the world!

Alright, we all know now that Hyo Jin Nim had his problems. It came out that one of the reasons was his reaction to finding out about pikareun: His assistant Madelene Pretorious reported, “When Hyo Jin found out about his father’s ‘purification’ rituals, that took a lot out of wind out of his sails.”

Continue reading: http://whatisonthemoon.tumblr.com/post/1707505373/what-i-am-grateful-for-this-thanksgiving

I received this memo, but I’m skeptical. It makes sense, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

세계통일교 선교본부
Unification Church World Mission Headquarters
13F Dowon Bldg., Dohwa 2 dong Mapo-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea 121-728
Tel: (82-2) 3275-4200 Fax: (82-2) 3275-4220 E-mail: mission@tongil.or.kr
Ref. No. WMH 2012-140 

To : Regional Presidents, National Messiahs, National Leaders
From : Unification Church World Mission Headquarters
Date : 10.02 by the Heavenly Calendar (November 15, 2012)
Re. : Foundation Day Physical Blessing


May God and True Parents’ blessings and love be with all regions, mission nations and providential organizations.

A hundred-plus days are left until 01.13 by the heavenly calendar in the 4th year of Cheon-gi (February 22, 2012), Day, which is the day of hope for God and humankind. Foundation Day is the day marking the substantial start of Cheon Il Guk, God’s nation which will be directly governed by God. It is also the day when all blessed families can receive the tremendous grace of being reborn as children of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind, and registered as citizens of Cheon Il Guk. All this has been made possible through the emergence of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind who are God’s substantial body.

The True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind said (this year, on 06.13 by the heavenly calendar) that blessed families must *convert their right of ownership* and graduate from the servant position to the position of child of True Parents. Until this historic moment, members have offered jeongseong and special offerings from the servants position, as part of God’s providence of restoration. As of Foundation Day, the worldwide membership will stand in the position of sons and daughters of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind. Instead of serving parents from a servant’s position, parents are finally able to love their children fully, including on the external level. Until now the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind have only been able to give spiritual blessings. With the coming of Foundation Day, physical blessings can also be showered on their children. This represents the liberation of God’s heart of love for his children, and is the internal foundation for the establishment of God’s nation.

The True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind today declare that the era of jeongseong and special offerings is coming to a victorious conclusion. With the establishment of the substantial beginning of Cheon Il Guk, God and True Parents are finally able to love their children freely. True Parents wish to further announce that they will give a physical blessing in the form of a gift to each member, as an expression of parental love, and in gratitude for years of sacrifice that the members have endured. Throughout the years the True Family has lived with physical blessings and abundance, including material things of fine quality. Most members have lived simply, sacrificing on a physical level. This was necessary for restoration, but with the victory of Foundation Day, this course has ended, and parents can freely give to their children in every way that their hearts desire.

The True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind would like to stress that this is not merely a gift of money to the members. It is a heartfelt expression of true parental heart embodied in a physical blessing to their children. In order for restoration to be complete, both physical and spiritual are required. Foundation Day opens the era of spiritual and physical blessings. True Parents would also like to take this opportunity to thank the world wide membership for faithfully walking the course of restoration hand-in-hand with them. This gift is an expression of their appreciation and love.

In order to be registered on Foundation Day and take part in the spiritual and physical Blessing, all members must receive True Parents’ gift. This is an expression of parental heart, which liberates God’s heart to love and care for his children freely, as He desires. Please take part in this grace.

1. Name of Gift: “Physical Blessing Gift from True Parents to the Worldwide Membership”

2. Gift amount for each family:

- US $13,000 will be given to each tithing family (with a member of at least 13 years) in good standing in Korea and Japan, and $3,100 to each non-tithing family (with a member of at least 3 years) in good standing, as defined by the respective headquarters. True Parents would like to express their heartfelt gratitude especially for the unselfish sacrifice of the Japanese members in particular over the course of many years.

- Tithing families in North America 1 and 2, Europe (Western Europe), Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), Asia (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia) with a member of at least 13 years in good standing will receive $1,300, and each non-tithing family with a member of at least 3 years in good standing will receive $310.

- In all other regions and nations tithing families with a member of at least 13 years in good standing will receive $130, and each non-tithing family with a member of at least 3 years in good standing will receive $31. True Parents realize these amounts are small, but they fulfill certain providential numbers in connection with Foundation Day. There will of course be more gifts in the future, and some of these will not need to be differentiated by country.

3. How to receive the gift

Each national headquarters should update its membership list so that it reflects the standards outlined above. When the membership list has been fully updated, the list should be sent (with notification that its updating is complete) to the World Mission Headquarters (see note below). Each regional headquarters should coordinate with the national headquarters in that region to accomplish this task.

4. Deadline for notification that list updating is complete: 12.28 by the heavenly calendar in the 3rd year of Cheon-gi (February 8, 2013). If possible True Parents would like to make their gifts to the worldwide membership before Foundation Day.

5. Specific instructions regarding the disbursement of funds to national headquarters for immediate distribution to the worldwide membership will be given at a later date. All members who do not currently have a bank account are encouraged to open one.

6. Administrative matters:

Please send lists of eligible members for the “Physical Blessing Gift from True Parents to the Worldwide Membership” by e-mail, or to the above FAX.


True Parents have promised that this is the first of many such gifts. Parents naturally want to share what they have with their children.


Unification Church
World Mission Headquarters

Some people who left the Unification Church were talking in one of the Facebook discussion groups about what they believe now. I said this:

I want to share something a little different. Two people might believe the same thing, but one person might come to that place years before another person, and their differences NOW could lead them to argue and even be disagreeable. I have a certain amount of respect for each person’s path, independent of the specific beliefs they have right now or will have in the future. We all need to find our way.

Second, I always encourage people to pursue the truth. Be honest with yourself and lean against the human tendency to easily accept evidence that conforms to what you want to believe and easily reject evidence that doesn’t. If there’s no reliable evidence for something, don’t believe it. You have to decide for yourself whether “cardiac evidence” (“knowing” it in your heart) counts as reliable evidence.

The scientific method is a great way to resist human biases. Interestingly, science is constantly discovering more and more that bears on questions that used to be only philosophical or religious. But you have to go through the process of evaluating the evidence and coming to conclusions yourself. People can help you at points along your path, and knowledgeable people can tell you what the facts are, but being told what to believe doesn’t usually work out very well.

Enjoy the journey. And wherever your path leads you, you can find a community of like-minded people. Take comfort in that thought when you need a little extra courage to face the truth.