Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 132

Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 3: The Mission of Religion in Achieving God’s Ideal
Speech 13: Religion and the Creation of World Peace, pg 461-464

Religion and the Creation of World Peace

August 26, 1992 InterContinental Hotel, Seoul, Korea
The Third Assembly of the World’s Religions

Respected major leaders of the different religious traditions, leaders in faith and scholars of religion:

It is an honor to welcome you to the third Assembly of the World’s Religions, and to express my happiness in meeting all of you in Seoul, Korea, which is my homeland and that of my wife, Hak Ja Han. I hope you will have a rewarding and fruitful time during your stay.

The path pursued by religion

This is the third conference of the Assembly of the World’s Religions. At the first conference, convened in 1985, I founded the Religious Youth Service and announced my plans for the first conference of the Council of the World’s Religions. These projects, which I support every year, together with the World Scripture that was published last year, have become the front line of the campaign for worldwide interreligious harmony. In particular, youth leaders of various religious bodies have united in dedicated service activities, providing a stepping-stone for harmony and understanding between religions. In doing this, they have set up a valuable tradition for the future of humanity.

The second Assembly was convened in San Francisco in 1990. There, I announced the founding of the Interreligious Federation for World Peace (IRFWP). In August 1991, the historic founding conference of the IRFWP took place in Seoul. This year the IRFWP and the International Religious Foundation are jointly convening this conference.

As you know, this conference has been organized as part of the first World Culture and Sports Festival. Four years ago, when the Seoul Olympics took place, I formally announced my plan for the World Culture and Sports Festival, which will open a new page of harmony, exchange and cooperation among the peoples of this world village. Although the Olympics play an extremely important role, they lack the vertical values and spiritual dimension that are bestowed by God.

Because religion lies at the heart of culture, the Assembly of the World’s Religions and IRFWP stand at the heart of the World Culture and Sports Festival. Religious ideals, together with the wisdom and values that accompany them, must permeate the education, scholarship, art, physical education, media, politics and economics of the world, and serve as their standard. The World Culture and Sports Festival seeks to guide the spiritual culture of humankind and pursue genuine values for human happiness. It will also be a historic event that points toward a peaceful, new world culture where God, people and all things merge together.

Toward a world of peace and happiness

We all are aware of the fact that our world is immersed in deep suffering. Although the Cold War may have come to an end, conflicts are still occurring in all corners of the world, and evil, hatred and injustice continue to afflict humanity. There are many people suffering in despair and spiritual poverty, even in materially abundant, advanced nations. Although many people are seeking solace through drugs and indiscriminate sex, they are running headlong down the road to spiritual and physical ruin. Obviously, no one desires a world of such evil, conflict and despair.

I came seeking to open the way for the original nature of humanity to clear away this unhappiness, and to build a world overflowing with peace and joy. This is the very path that religions have sought to tread. Nonetheless, the ideal world for which humanity has been yearning has not yet been realized. At the core of religion lies the desire to reveal the source of the unhappiness and suffering of humanity. If we are ignorant of the source of suffering, we cannot even hope to get rid of it. The solution to this is possible only through knowledge derived from divine revelation.

We were born for true love

Today I intend to clarify the root cause of this problem, and to indicate its solution. God created the ancestors of humankind, Adam and Eve, and bestowed upon them the three great blessings: to be fruitful, to multiply and fill the earth, and to have dominion over all things. The meaning of the first blessing, to be fruitful, is that all individuals have to grow and become people of perfected character focusing on God’s love. The second blessing signifies that a perfected man and woman have to become a true couple, give birth to children and, through treading the path of true parenthood, create an ideal family. The third blessing is to become inheritors of a heavenly environment on earth, free of want and distress, in the environment that God has provided.

God, the embodiment of true love, hoped that all people, who are the object partners of His love and whom He created as His sons and daughters, would become perfected incarnations of true love. He hoped that they would then establish a heavenly environment after achieving the conjugal ideal based on true love. Tragically, Adam and Eve deviated through unprincipled love in a stage of immaturity, before they had perfected the true love that God had blessed them with. They were driven out of paradise. Consequently the ancestors of humankind, who had lost true love, which is the source of life and their original divine nature, ignored God’s blessing and started family life centering on the selfish love originating with Satan. Thus, they handed down the love, life and bloodline of Satan to their descendants.

God, determined to restore His ideal of creation that was not accomplished due to the Fall and committed to save humankind from unhappiness, has established religions to guide humanity. Accordingly, since Adam and Eve had become false parents, God needed to send the Messiah, that is, True Parents, to give rebirth to all humanity. God’s ultimate and unchanging dispensational purpose is to find and establish True Parents. True Parents come as the personification of love and the seed of true life. A true family originates with the True Parents, and this family becomes the model for all families in their path of restoration.

God’s true love is the love that He invests again and again, then forgetting how much He has invested. When God created His object partner of love, He Himself, who exists for the sake of others, invested 100 percent of His being and still desired to invest another 100 percent and even 1,000 percent more. God wants to invest Himself still more because He wants His loving child, who is His object partner of love, to be better than Himself.

Thus, the path of true love is the path of giving and giving yet again. Likewise, the path of True Parents, who are the embodiment of true love, is not one that seeks recognition but is the way of sacrificing for the sake of others. God established religions for His providence of salvation. The path they must exemplify is one of principle. Because human life is conceived as rooted in the ideal of love, the essence of human life is love. A being that is born on the basis of love needs to live for others in the same way God does. This is the principle of Heaven. Consequently, one can say that we are beings who have come into existence for the purpose of true love.