Jesus, Sun Myung Moon, and Me: a Platinum Post from William Poe
******************************* A bit of introduction may be in order. I grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist church. My family wasn’t especially religious, but we often attended Sunday sermons and not least due to peer pressure, I was baptized when I was nine years old. As a teen, and without much resistance from my parents, I became interested in more spiritualist approaches to religion. By age fifteen, I had read all the books about Edgar Cayce, and other contemporary mystics. My readings led me to question the foundations of Christianity. I had concerns that Christians seemed unwilling to address. I continually asked, what if the first-century Jews had accepted Jesus and protected him against Roman authorities, what then. The answer was always that it wasn’t God’s will. I found that unsatisfying. As an eighteen-year-old freshman at university, I studied anthropology and, in another class, became aware of Abraham Maslow and his proposal that people strive for self-actualization. The mix of spiritualism, anthropology, and psychology contributed to my openness to proponents of the new religious [...]
