Religious Thought for the 21st Century

    The Fourth  Gospel sheds light on our understanding of the life of John the Baptist from the perspective of early Christianity. Whereas the three Synoptic Gospels depended on John's own understanding of himself as the one who had come to prepare the way and did not elaborate much on that except by adding a citation from Malachi, or having Jesus directly proclaim John as the promised Elijah in Malachi, the last Gospel created a groundbreaking job description for John's role in the providence. John 1:6-8 proclaims: 6  There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light. This revolutionary description appears in the very same Prologue where the groundbreaking description of the Word being God appears. The author of the Fourth Gospel, no doubt, had taken time to cast basic early Christian teachings ...

“God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.” ― John Calvin “if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.” ― Charles Dickens , Bleak House Predestination,according to the great Wikipedia means: is the doctrine that all events have been willed by God, usually with reference to the eventual fate of the individual soul. Explanations of predestination often seek to address the " paradox of free will ", whereby God's omniscience seems incompatible with human free will. In this usage, predestination can be regarded as a form of religious determinism; and usually predeterminism.  The theory of Predestination is a very complex one. It tries to resolve the contradiction of teaching about God...

True Father is the religious title given to Rev. Sun Myung Moon by his followers and by many other people from other religions who saw him as God's representative for our time. America committed a great injustice when it send Rev. Sun Myung Moon to jail for a fabricated case on tax evasion. The so-called case had been rejected by several district attorneys saying that no real case existed. Rev. Moon was being charged for an approved practice for religious groups. He was jailed for doing something that was and still is standard practice in most mainline churches. Those who decided to lift charges were motivated by something else than truth or justice. They were simply looking to destroy Rev. Moon and his movement. They completely failed. When Rev. Moon came out of prison, he was welcomed by many religious leaders and subsequently over 7000 Christian ministers went to Korea to understand Rev. Moon and the teachings and roots of HSA-UWC. In just five years some branches of Chri...

In the previous post on this topic we discussed that even Jesus' disciples required that Jesus repeat to them the idea that John the Baptist had the providential role of standing for the Elijah the prophet Malachi had prophesied about coming prior to the appearance of the Messiah. In this one we will examine how much more difficult it must have been for the people to accept that proclamation. What would make the people's decision more difficult to accept? The Divine Principle explains that "(s)ince the disciples already believed that Jesus was the Messiah, they willingly accepted his testimony that John the Baptist was Elijah. Yet how could others who did not know Jesus accept this controversial claim?" Why would it be so controversial? The answer is easy: John the Baptist himself denied that he was Elijah. Just as Jesus simply said: John is the Elijah that was to come, and did not go into any detail as to how John was Elijah; John simply said no, when he wa...

The Gospels Depiction of the Work of John the Baptist  Based on Old Testament Prophecies The Gospels concur in there existing a special relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist. The Synoptic Gospels depict John as an special envoy from God to 'prepare the way" for people to come to Jesus. Luke and Matthew introduce John's mission as that prophesied in Isaiah 40 about  an anonymous voice crying “In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord ; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.."  When Mark introduces John from verse 1:2, he adds to this formula a small part that comes from Malachi 3:1  " I will send my messenger , who will prepare the way before me." Matthew also adds this verse on a later occasion when John has been already put in jail and Jesus speaks to the people about John.  Jesus gives the following words: " What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? 8 But what did you go out t...

God sent Jesus Christ, the Messiah, to that people as promised. According to His plan, the people were in the position of having the responsibility to receive him. However, the people who had yearned for the coming of the Messiah did not receive him. Rather, they watched their leaders persecute him, seize him and have him killed. Ladies and gentlemen, is this not confusing?...   Simply saying Jesus came to die is insufficient. It is logically wrong. If you came to die, why would you ask God to forgive those who killed you? There is no reason for the death of innumerable prophets for four thousand years and the suffering of the people of Israel if their role were to reject the Messiah. If the purpose of his coming were rejection, God could have sent him to a group of uncivilized savages. How easily they would have killed him. How would you answer that?                             ...

What is a dual prophecy? God in his wisdom gave us prophecies that foretell the future. He did that in order to lead us into repentance and find His way of salvation. In other words, God does not prophecy that anyone will live a faithless life till the end because it is his desire and will that each of us be saved. However, our Heavenly Parent knows that we as free agents of our destiny decide how we will respond to His word. We may receive or we may reject it. As such God prophecies depends on Human Response. He may prophecy that he will destroy a city and then after people repent, decide not to destroy it. You are not sure of the validity of this idea. Well, what is the story of Jonah if not about this. Jonah himself was swallowed by a big fish not because he was a faithless person but because he did not want to prophecy a destruction of Nineveh, believing that the people would repent and then God not destroy them.That was exactly what happened. We read in Jonah 3: 10  ...

On August , 2018 Mrs. Moon visited Brazil to deliver a speech at the Citibank Hall on Sao Paulo. The event was a success. During the following days there were special conferences and even a private meeting with Mrs. Moon. To this event one Catholic Cardinal and other religious leaders were present and they asked many questions to Mrs. Moon. In one conference Mrs. Moon asked world leaders to support her work to build an International Highway Project that would break the frontiers between the nations of South and North America. On a celebration speech on August  she told the members of the Family Federation of Latin America that were present that "we can no longer wait, we can no longer wait, we will no loner wait," the truth must be proclaim boldly to everyone we know. What is that truth that requires immediate proclamation? To understand more clearly our times we need to realize that we have been living on a parallel time period to the time that Jesus was ...