Founder's Address
Second Assembly of the World's Religions
I would like to extend a heartfelt welcome to all of you to this Second Assembly of the World's Religions, where we are to discuss transmitting our religious heritage to our youth and society.
In this time of grave importance, a time of transition in human history, I am convinced that all of us religious leaders feel the dispensational call of duty, and as I stand here, I am full of recollections and expectations.
As we are all too aware, the founders of all the great religions had to suffer from a lack of understanding on the world's part and to endure extreme persecution. In pioneering the way of truth, they all had to overcome physical and spiritual persecution, even death. But despite their great accomplishments, the paths actually taken by religions often departed from those that were originally intended.
Religions typically have shown division, contradiction, and disharmony within themselves and even have fought one another.
Still in today's world, wrongful religious zeal and narrow-mindedness induce antagonisms and hatred.
Further, faith has frequently held only formality important and has disregarded practice, and this has given rise to social problems. Such are clearly not the true objectives of religion, and we must not bequeath any mistaken tradition to our descendants.
Then what is the true purpose of religion? What is a correct tradition to bequeath?
First, Know God's Ideal
For us to understand the purpose of religion, it is necessary first to understand God's ideal for the creation.
For God, who is absolute and eternal, why was creation necessary?
What was it that God needed absolutely?
Was it material goods, knowledge, or power?
Those are available to God any time, and God can regulate them as He requires.
Rather, true love can be formed only with a reciprocator; without a counterpart, even God cannot realize love. God created the world to realize His ideal of true love.
As we observe the mineral, plant, and animal worlds, we see that they are created with relationships of subject and object pairs that can respond to each other in harmony, centered on love.
Such relationships are found on each level of the creation. Man is the center of the creation and is created to be on the highest level, the closest to God. He is the partner of God's love.
Thus, man is the object of God's true love, and without man, God's goal of true love cannot be accomplished. God had established as the highest and absolute value His true love, which is His ideal for the creation.
Even the absolute God Himself likes to absolutely surrender to true love. In this perspective, we can readily see how high a value a man has as God's own object of true love.
God originated His ideal of creation with love for the sake of others; He gives and gives, without even remembering that He gave. In this, he is realizing true love. God began His creation investing without limit.
All people are created so that they can harmonize, exist, and live eternally through God's principle of investing for the sake of others. Man came into being for the sake of woman; woman for man.
Taking after God's ideal for the creation, which is the giving of true love, both man and woman are born to give love and become husband and wife. By doing so, they become the object of God's vertical love. This is the very purpose of their existence.
Men or women who are about to be married wish that their spouses were better than themselves. Parents, too, want their children to be better and greater. These attributes come directly from God. These wishes center on true love. It is the same with God. God, too, wants His object of love to be better.
Therefore, He invests 100 percent over and over again so that He can create better objects, and true love continues to exist in this manner.
God, who is the origin of true love, wished to give from the Father's position this absolute and unchanging true love as an inheritance to man. Since in true love, perfect harmony and unity are realized, God's true love can be perfectly bequeathed to man, who is His partner.
Not only that, but the right to live together with God and the right to share absolute value with God are also bestowed upon man because of the attributes of true love. From this perspective, human beings can live with God as His children and have the same value as God Himself.
Furthermore, even among themselves, human beings, centering on true love, can share their inheritance, live together, and become equal. Thus, in the ideal world, all human beings, centering on God's true love, will possess true individual ideals and happiness and transmit both of these to their spouses and offspring. This was the world of God's original ideal.
Today's world, however, is far from the world God intended. Contrary to the original world, it has degraded itself to become a world of hell, full of sin, struggle, and pain.
In the world of nature and the spiritual world, the original order of God's creation still exists, but the world of man on earth has become ill and brought damage to the natural world and the spiritual world.
We call this sick, broken human world, in religious terms, the fallen world. To bring this fallen world back to its original condition and order, God wages a dispensation for salvation. Thus, as I have been teaching, God's work of salvation is the work of restoration, or synonymously, the work of re-creation.
Call to True Parentism
That which has played the main role in the dispensation for restoration according to Heavenly Will is religion.
The purpose of religions lies in the restoration of this world as the original ideal family, and beyond that, the establishment of the ideal world centering on God's true love and the thought of True Parents.
When we understand the mission of the Messiah as a mission of True Parents to realize God's love in this world, we are all called by God to pursue and accomplish this mission.
The mission of the Messiah is thus the cosmic mission that all religions are now undertaking—to expel Satan, who has been rebelling against God, and end his culture; and to transform Satan's lineage to God's to bring about the God-centered ideal world.
As described in the Bible, Adam and Eve, the first son and daughter of God, were to grow in God's true love and receive the blessing of marriage and give birth to sinless children. Thus, they, like God, would become True Parents and could enter into heaven.
In this way, the world was to be the world of heaven on earth, where God's true love, God's true life, and God's true lineage were inherited. God's ideal family was to expand to realize a world where only God reigns.
However, Adam and Eve entered into illicit love before becoming mature: the archangel became Satan, Adam and Eve became evil ancestors, and the world of death began. The world has become a world with people in Satan's lineage.
Satan became a god of lewdness, and God hates lewdness the most. Because of lewdness, America and Europe today face the fate that befell Sodom, Gomorrah, and Rome.
What Adam and Eve sowed while in their youth, the world now is to harvest: evidence that today is the end of days is quite unmistakable. The world needs to find the True Parent who can liberate it from Satan's love, life, and lineage. This person is the Messiah.
By Adam and Eve failing to fulfill their responsibility, God lost true children, and mankind failed to possess True Parents. Tragedy has been the result. As a result of the fall, the true being who can realize the true love of God and the ideal of True Parents. To correct the tragic failure of the fall and restore the original condition, God established religions.
Thus, the Messiah comes with the wonderful task to stand as True Parent, uproot the false root that was planted by the human ancestors who became false parents, and realize the ideal world of creation. God's original ideal did not include establishing religion or creating a Messiah.
God's unchanging purpose is to realize families, nations, and a world of true love.
How much a religion contributes to this determines the value of that religion. In this perspective, religions that are fulfilling their purpose are realizing true love and true families.
Conversely, religions that do not contribute to this end and exist just for their own sake, even though claiming to do things in God's name, are failing their true mission.
In a family, the relationship among brothers and sisters exists only on the premise of common parents. Thus, before this world can enter into the realm of true love and true family, the True Parents' position must first be established. To help fulfill this very purpose, I have been called upon by God.
For this objective, I have dedicated myself. The unification movement I am deploying worldwide, the ecumenical movement, and all other projects that I have sponsored, covering all fields—academic, educational, media, technical, business, financial, etc., were envisioned with this one purpose.
I have suffered persecution and confronted death with only one purpose in mind, so that I can live with the heart of True Parents to love races of all colors in the world more than my parents who gave birth to me or my brothers and sisters.
The path of true love travels the direct route. It requires no preconditions, and nothing can block it. This is the straight path on which we travel rightly only with self-sacrifice. Unless all mankind lives the life of True Parents, the ideal of world peace is directly connected.
All countries, races, cultures, and religions should do more than 100 percent for the sake of each other, being generous and harmonious, and by doing so, achieve world peace.
Inter-Religious Federation
Today, I propose to you the inauguration of the Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace. In the current world situation, externally, we are experiencing the termination of the Cold War and peacemaking between East and West.
Overcoming confrontations and divisions, we are heading toward the age of unification by harmony, as one world family of brothers and sisters.
The last decade before the year 2000 is a precious period that God has allowed us for returning to the original world, a precious opportunity. I have already proposed the external establishment of the International Federation for World Peace, and thousands of leaders in the United States, Russia, and other countries of the world are responding enthusiastically. To truly achieve this goal, we need an internal foundation, and that is an inter-religious foundation for world peace.
Many have devoted themselves to seeking true unity and the achievement of one world, but true world peace still evades us. Everyone wants peace, but we must first know what is necessary to bring it about.
The key lies not in one's spouse, sons and daughters, neighbors, nation, or world—it is right in oneself. It depends on whether one can himself become a harmonious being, where his mind and body have achieved harmony and unity centering on his original mind.
When a person comes to have the heart of God and True Parents, he can begin to live fully for the sake of others and consistently lead a life where true love is the center, a life in which he can achieve true peace.
These are concerns of religion. The role of religions in realizing ultimate world peace is therefore indispensable.
Accordingly, all men and women of religion should now tear down the walls of sectarianism to make themselves available with unified religious power to act in accordance with God's desires for the greater goal of the realization of world peace.
Now is the time to reflect that religious people have not contributed enough to world peace.
Now is the time to develop within each religion true love, which is the origin and basic element of world peace, and by practicing it faithfully, to deploy an all-encompassing movement, the Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace.
God requires good practice and example by men and women of religion. God does not exist for the sake of religion. Religion was established to achieve the will of God to restore the world to its original condition, where people invest and invest again for the sake of the world. Any religion with which God wants to work in this world now is a religion of True Parents.
Only a religion with a parental heart, a religion that practices true love, can accomplish God's will in this hopelessly complex world situation. Thus far in history, there have been many religions.
There have been religions in the position of adopted son, in the position of stepson, in the position of son, and so on.
The religions, in all their different positions, should transcend any limited view that their religion is the best, that only through their religion will world peace be accomplished.
Rather, the teachings of religions in all the positions are eventually to be fused and united in the religion in the position of True Parents. Then, the decline that religions are experiencing will end.
All religions, centering on true love, which exists absolutely for the sake of others, will unite and march forward to realize world peace and realize heaven on earth.
Knowing this, we should proceed to solve the world's urgent problems through the right practice of religion.
The tasks of changing ritualized faith into living faith, reestablishing the true value perspective from the many confused value perspectives, restoring the original human nature from deviated and desolate human nature, elevating the moral standard, and liquidating the decadent culture all are to be accomplished by men and women of religion gathered in an allied movement of the eternal God, practicing the true love of True Parentism.
The youth of the world today are intuitively realizing this great opportunity that lies in front of us. As true religious leaders, we must act in the capacity of true teachers to these youth.
Beginning with this true love, which is the standard of eternal, unchanging absolute value, we should establish not only the unification of mind and body, but we should connect and unify the two worlds represented by both spiritual and materialistic ideologies.
This will create the foundation for world peace. On this foundation, we should unite the inner world of religions and then unite the outer world of nations and eventually achieve eternal world peace. In realizing this goal, all men and women of religion must play a responsible role.
Many young people hunger for true love, which is to live for the sake of others. We religious leaders must exemplify God's true love and the absolute value of the way of True Parents. We must make certain that religious traditions travel on the path of true love.
By doing so, God and mankind united together will march forward to a new world of hope and achieve God's ideal of creation. Therefore, let us clearly show the world and our youth that a new age of peace, of true family, and true mankind has begun.
In conclusion, I wish that your discussion throughout this conference period will help realize true religion and the discovery of true love and become a great contribution to the world. May God's blessing be always with you.
The San Francisco Declaration
We who have participated in the Second Assembly of the World's Religions, held in San Francisco from August 15-21, 1990, join in making the following three-fold affirmation of the centrality of religion in human life and society:
We reaffirm our commitment to religious freedom throughout the world.
Furthermore, we declare our conviction that religious and spiritual values have primacy over merely material achievements, and indeed that it is only in faithfulness to those values that humankind will follow the road to true progress. Furthermore, we seek in all things to conform ourselves to the divine goodness that gives meaning to human life.
In this time of global expectation, we resolve to strive for a new international order based on peace, justice, and fraternity. We proclaim the unity of the human family and reject all forms of exploitation of its members.
We defend the right of all peoples to a fair share of the earth's resources, and we protest against all forms of political and social injustice. In furtherance of these ideals, we will pray and work for greater understanding and mutual love between the religions and believers of the world, gathered in spiritual power to promote the welfare of all humankind.
We recognize our duty to give to our children an education and a preparation for adult life inspired by the highest truths and values of our respective religious traditions.
We pledge ourselves to love and service of children and young people, the rising generation upon whom the future of our communities and of all human society depends.
Sun Myung Moon