Talk:Heung Jin Moon

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[edit] Early (May 2005) discussions

What a load of sentimental crap - surely not up to NPOV standards! [unsigned]

On Feb 20 1984 Ballerina Julia Pak married the ghost of Sun Myung Moon's dead son, Heung Jin Moon, in a tasteful necro-ceremony. The couple were engaged to be married, but the car accident in December intervened. Unfortunately in the Moonie religion, only married couples may enter Heaven, hence the need for this awkward rite.

• ghost
• tasteful necre-ceremony
• Unfortunately
• awkward

Would someone help me copyedit this passage? It seems snide, as if the writer were deliberately sniping at Moon & Pak. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 15:22, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

Hey, at least they said it was tasteful. How's this?

Moon's death came before his planned marriage to ballerina Julia Pak. According to the tenets of his religion only married couples may enter heaven. Therefore his parents conducted a post-mortem marriage ceremony three months later, February 20, 1984.

Any better? -Willmcw 17:19, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

Considerably - although the term post-mortem carries the connotation of "trying to figure out why he died". I don't think he's parents were really wondering about that...

In fact, we should mention in the article that his father noted the coincidence between the precise hour of (1) his son's car crash and (2) the start of a his crucial Kwangju speech at which (he claims) terrorists were planning to assassinate him. (Don't worry, I will not present it as FACT but as Rev. Moon's POV.) -- Uncle Ed (talk) 19:08, May 5, 2005 (UTC)

Well, post mortem literally means after death. In any case, if there is a theory that it was not an accident then it sounds like his parents were not sure why their son died. How did hitting a truck prevent an assassination? It's not clear from your comment as to who was giving the speech, what it was, or why it was crucial. Lastly, if the church does in fact believe that unmarried souls cannot enter heaven, then is it correct that Heung Jin Moon entered heaven immediately, even though the marriage did not occur until months later? It would be helpful to have some better explanation of that. Cheers, -Willmcw 19:38, May 5, 2005 (UTC)

Also, it'd be nice to get the usual biographical info - when and where born, attendance at college, etc. -Willmcw 19:39, May 5, 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I'll get to that eventually. But getting bakc to "entering heaven" first:

In another article, I will have to clarify the Unification Church's concept of heaven and afterlife. The most commonly discussed idea in Christianity (or in atheistic critiques of Christianity) is that of a sharply bifurcated "either-or" division of the spirit world into Heaven and Hell. Glorious rewards for the good guys and unbearably nasty punishments for the bad guys.

Much of the criticism of this simple either-or division centers on the Rules used to determine one's fate. Did I "accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour"? (the fundamentalist question) Have I confessed my sins? (the factor that made Hamlet delay killing Claudius)

Why should a simple mental or verbal exercise have so profound an effect on a matter at least as weighty as whether a prisoner remains in or gets out of a Vietnamese Hanoi Hilton?

Anyway, this is not very relevant to the current article; perhaps I digress (as at prisoner abuse). But to return to the point at hand: the spirit world has various levels. It's not simply +1 and -1 (or even +1, 0 and -1 where 0 = Catholic purgatory). "The measure you give will be the measure you get," Jesus said, so the quality of one's afterlife is directly related to how well one has "lived for the sake of others".

The doctrine of "cannot enter heaven single" refers to an upper level of the already rather high level an unmarried saint would merit. Often these distinction don't survive translation from Korean very well. You'd have to be very familiar with UC doctrine to interpret an isolated quote like that.

I'm not saying it was taken out of context, since that would blame the reader / quoter. Rather, it was poorly translated or edited. So much of what Rev. Moon has said, simply isn't understood well because we followers have not made the effort to systematize our understanding. We merely compile his speeches, a process that works fairly well in Korean, but ...

Okay, back to work for me. I hope you caught my drift. And anyway, thanks for your conscientious efforts to bring accuracy and clarity into these articles. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 16:05, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. For the purposes of this article then, perhaps it would be sufficient to say that marriage is required in order to reach the highest level of heaven. I'll go ahead and insert that. Cheers, -Willmcw 20:29, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

We also need to know more about this assassiniation attempt, which I don't think is even mentioned in the article on Sun Moon. I think we can leave off the fact that he loved horses and stray cats. -Willmcw 20:33, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

He also like working on old junk cars, fixing them up. You know, nothing goes to waste? (Like stray cats.) Now he spends all his spare time rescuing lost souls from hell, when their descendants participate in the grace and repentance ceremony.

Okay, a lot of this is going to seem theoretical / theological. (I just wrote Fictionology, so I know how zany it all looks. ;-)

I'll go into assassination attempts as part of the Sun Myung Moon article. There have been several (to my knowledge). And I have no idea how many which were hushed up. Security guards once found a time bomb at the church's Belevedere Estate set so it would have exploded during Rev. Moon's speech to members, had it not been detected. (You're often better at digging up sources than I am; I wonder why that is so? I ought to be familiar with my own church! *sigh* Maybe I'm too close to the subject.) -- Uncle Ed (talk) 16:56, May 11, 2005 (UTC)

I finally found a biography of Rev. Moon, which I added to the external links of that article. I haven't had a chance to read it yet - there may be more info on the assassinations there.

Regarding Heung Jin, some mention should also be made of his posthumous books. I've seen some references which describe them as having been "channeled." Do you consider that to be an NPOV term? If we're going to include statements about his present activities, they'll have to be clearly attributed. Cheers, -Willmcw 21:37, May 11, 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure "channeling" is a mainstream term. We speak of "dictating" and "recording", in our light-hearted confidence that a specific, known spirit man is transmitting messages to a particular earthly person. "Channeling" has a connotation of being rather haphazard, and I think it deserves this reputation.

Hm. Maybe I'll get into past lives (past life regression?) and reincarnation while I'm at it. The general public has practically no exposure whatever to the Unification Church's POV about a distinction between "returning resurrection" and reincarnation. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 19:06, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Notability?

Is this article really necessary? --Nissi Kim 21:47, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Did you read the article?!?

"Heung Jin Moon is officially regarded to be the 'king of the spirits' in heaven (rather than Jesus)"

An argument can be made that Heung Jin Moon is to Unificationism what Mary is to Catholicism, the second most important figure in the history of the world after the messiah (for Unificationists, that's True Parents). I suppose his significance should be made clear in the first paragraph. Unless you think that Wikipedia should have no more than 2 or 3 articles on Sun Myung Moon and Unificationism (see the long list of - sometimes marginally notable - topics in category Unification Church), you really can't argue that Heung Jin Moon is not notable in relation to the Unification Church. He is central, both in terms of the beliefs of Unificationists and in the history of Unificationism. -Exucmember 17:23, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I've seen the Unification article and the Moon article. IMO, a merge could be a bit better for the content. In the mean time, can we have some specific cited notations for the certain key facts in this article? --Nissi Kim 22:32, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

It seems, though, that you did not go to Category:Unification Church, or you would have seen 89 pages (89 articles) on topics related to the Unification Church, and at that point I think you would have reconsidered the suggestion that the long Sun Myung Moon article and the long Unification Church article be merged (that is what you suggested, right?), because that would seem to imply merging all 89 articles into one.

On the second issue you raised, I've seen some Wikipedia articles that just list the references at the end (as this Heung Jin Moon article does) and other articles where the references are specifically footnoted with a one-to-one correspondence. I prefer the latter, but in some articles this method may be unwieldy, as textual material is supported by multiple references and/or vice-versa. If you mean to say that you would like to see the latter system used for this article, you could attempt to convert it yourself, if you are sufficiently interested in this topic.

On the original issue you raised, I have moved the sentence about his notability in the context of Unificationism to the first paragraph. -Exucmember 06:18, 28 September 2006 (UTC)