Within minutes, the Mount Carmel Center was engulfed in flames. Approximately fifty adults and twenty-five children died in the fire.
Among the casualties was David Koresh.
And perhaps as a testament to David Koresh’s final, maniacal insistence on total control over his own and his followers’ destiny, the catastrophic fire that consumed the compound, according to FBI wiretaps, appeared to have been set. So in a way, he was absolutely prophetic—he predicted the end of the world and then played his part in seeing to it for all those people who trusted him, and all those innocent children who had no choice about it at all. Somehow I think the Branch Davidians expected more and better from their long-awaited messiah.
The Unification Church: Sun Myung Moon
Legend has it that one day in 1936, on a Korean mountainside, Jesus Christ appeared to a sixteen-year-old boy and gave him the news that he’d been chosen by God to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. That boy, Sun Myung Moon, proclaimed himself the messiah, the Second Coming, and/or the Lord of the Second Advent, and, in 1954, established what was officially called the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, commonly known as the Unification Church. Half a century later, its membership purportedly numbers in the tens of thousands in one hundred countries around the world.
By 1957 the Reverend Moon (a self-ordained title) had written a 536-page manifesto called Divine Principle, which he claimed was directly communicated to him by Jesus Christ. Moonies, as his followers are called, believe the Divine Principle to be the third testament of the Bible and follow its authority with unflinching loyalty. And predictably, anyone who questions Moon’s status as the messiah or doubts the credibility of the Divine Principle is in league with the Devil, doing Satan’s handiwork.
Among the basics of Moon’s teachings:
- Adam and Eve were initially created to have a platonic relationship until they reached perfection. Only then would they be worthy of marriage and childbearing for the purpose of establishing God’s kingdom on Earth. But because of Eve’s sexual sin—sex with the devil, i.e., the spiritual fall from grace—followed by sex with Adam, i.e., the physical fall from grace, God’s intention for them to be the “true parents” of humankind was never realized.
- Because of Eve’s sexual relationship with Satan, all sin committed by unredeemed humans is not a moral choice but is instead the result of genetics—we’re all sinners as descendants of Eve and Satan, in other words, until and unless we achieve salvation. And what do you know, Sun Myung Moon is the only possible source of salvation. Salvation via Moon could happen for women by being “cleansed” by him, which meant having sexual intercourse with him. It could happen for men through “blood cleansing,” or having sexual intercourse with a woman who’d been “cleansed” by Moon. It could happen through a marriage personally orchestrated and blessed by Moon. And/or it could happen by absolute submission to Sun Myung Moon’s omnipotence—willingness to allow Moon to select a mate, to hand over all earthly assets to the church, to encourage their children to think of Moon and his wife as their “true parents,” and so on.
- Jesus Christ, according to Divine Principle/Sun Myung Moon, was not the son of God or the result of a virgin birth. Jesus’s intended purpose was to father perfect children through an approved marriage, but he was crucified before he could accomplish that purpose. Rather than symbolizing redemption for Christians, the
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