Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 207
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 5: Absolute Values and New World Order
Speech 8: Absolute Value Perspective, pg 737-739
Absolute Value Perspective
November 25, 1982
Franklin Plaza Hotel, Philadelphia, USA
Eleventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences
Distinguished chairmen, eminent scholars, ladies and gentlemen:
We have now come to meet for our eleventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences in the historic city of Philadelphia. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to our chairman, Dr. Morton Kaplan, to the committee chairmen and group chairmen, to the International Cultural Foundation secretariat, and to all you distinguished professors and other ladies and gentlemen who bring your insights to this conference.
The world in chaos and the need for an absolute truth
If we are to characterize today’s world in one phrase, we can say that it is a world of enormous confusion. Whether we look to the Orient or the Occident, the North or the South, the advanced world or the developing world, all societies are filled with contradiction, injustice and corruption.
There is endless repetition of conflict, collision and rebellion. While people in advanced nations enjoy material affluence, many in the Third World, especially Africa, are suffering from hunger and even dying from starvation. If this state of confusion worsens and accelerates, humanity will face the danger of perishing, a danger from which it will be difficult to escape.
What could be the reason behind such worldwide confusion? The cause could be attributed to many factors, but the ultimate reason lies in the conflict of value perspectives. Confusion arises because standards of truth, goodness and beauty differ from person to person, nation to nation, race to race, and one thought system to another.
If, in the opinion of person A, an action is good, but person B considers it to be bad, A may persist with the action at any cost, but B would oppose it strenuously. In such a situation, we see confrontation and disharmony, and conflict will certainly arise. I cannot help but conclude that today’s confusion stems from conflict and disagreement between value perspectives.
What, then, is the basis for differences in value perspectives? It stems, first of all, from egoism. Almost without exception, each individual is a prisoner of egoism, and each nation and each race is selfishly pursuing its own interests.
Secondly, the differences in value perspectives stem from differences in thought systems. The world abounds with various thought systems, and each keeps many adherents captive. Most significantly, communism and democracy have, through their ideologies, now divided humankind into two major blocs.
Accordingly, we cannot help but state that the way to save humankind from certain destruction is, first, to eliminate egoism and, second, to solve the problem of differences between thought systems. To liquidate egoism, we first need to know why people fell into self-centeredness. Before we hope to resolve the differences between thought systems, we have to discover how and why humanity came to have these differences.
The origin of our differing thought systems is that humankind, because of the Fall, lost God, thereby losing both God’s love and God’s words. God’s love is the source of values—truth, goodness and beauty. Accordingly, God’s love is the basis of absolute values, and absolute values form the basis of all religious virtues. They are the unifying values. God’s truth is the basis of all truths and therefore of absolute truth, which is the unifying truth. As a consequence of the Fall, humanity lost God and lost absolute values, including absolute truth, thereby losing unifying values and unifying truth.
Absolute values, including absolute truth, are the foundation for an absolute value perspective, where “perspective” refers to viewpoint and theory. Accordingly, we arrive at the conclusion that the way to resolve worldwide confusion is to find the absolute value perspective.
God established religion to convey His love and truth to humanity, in order to save humanity. He established various religions, each in its own time and place. For example, He founded Buddhism in India and Confucianism in China about twenty-five hundred years ago, and Christianity in Judea about two thousand years ago.
We can confidently affirm that the absolute value perspective can be established only through religions, which revere God. In other words, it would be valid to claim that no solution to today’s confusion is possible through those thoughts and philosophies that are not founded on God. It follows logically that only through God-centered religion is it possible for humanity to be saved from confusion. In history, we have such examples as Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Each one, in its own time and place, dissipated social insecurity and confusion and, on the foundation of peace and security, brought forth a flourishing of culture. This was true of the role of Confucian culture in the Han Dynasty of China, Christian culture in medieval Europe, and Islamic culture in the Saracen civilization of the Middle East.
Today, unfortunately, religion is no longer able to dissipate confusion and lead the human spirit. Religions today are gradually losing life, and faith is progressively becoming a mere form or habit. With few exceptions, people are increasingly losing interest in religion, and their original enthusiasm in faith is waning. This is a grave situation, because if religion, which is supposed to lead the human spirit, eventually loses its function, the world will turn to complete lawlessness, and humanity will sink into an abyss of violence and murder. Today, indeed, such phenomena are increasingly evident.
All this can be readily termed a phenomenon of the collapse of the religious value perspective. What then is the cause of this collapse?
First, with the development of science and technology and growth of the economy, the human spirit is drifting into a materialistic value perspective. Second, various atheistic and materialistic ideas are spreading rapidly and widely. Third, under national policies separating education and religion, religion is being excluded from school curricula, resulting in the rise of atheistic thought. Fourth, communists are using a strategy of intentionally destroying even the fraction of the religious value perspective that remains, to promote their own goal of communizing the world. Fih, there is a woeful lack of ontological theory adequate for supporting the religious value perspective.
FFWPU, USA