Nice to see this forum cleaned up!! Congrats to those who made it happen.
As to my beliefs, I was born, baptized, and raised in the Episcopal Church. My dad was very seriously committed to his faith: he took the whole family to church every Sunday; he would lead us in prayer each night before sleep time; and he prayed every morning before he started his day.
I attended Church, was confirmed, and served as an acolyte (liturgical assistant to the priest leading the service) for five years. I had a spiritual experience with Christ Jesus when I attended my first mid-night Christmas Eve service. My dad had to push me to go, as I was a sleepy teenager, but I am forever grateful to him that he did because it opened my spiritual eyes to the love and grace of God.
When I went to college, though, my church attendance and spiritual pursuit dropped off, as I became more secular in my thinking: my concerns were focused on "making it big" in the world. Things like money, power, and fame became the "glamorous" attractions in my life. At the same time, however, I could not escape feeling my obligation to God and Jesus and my nation. It was the Vietnam era, so I felt I should join the military to fight militant atheistic communism, which I viewed the biggest threat to America and the world.
After I went on active duty, however, I began to see that the use of force does NOT provide the lasting solution to human conflicts; I needed to find a better way, a more peaceful way, a non-violent way to end human struggles. But it had to be a way that did not exclude God or people who believed in God and eternal world. I even had another visitation by Jesus when I was working on a farm in New Hampshire and Christ came to me and told me to keep on searching, that he indeed loved me very much.
Finally, after much searching for about ten years, I met the Unification Church movement in 1975 -- in New York City, of all places. I learned about God's ideal of creation, how Adam and Eve had been given a beautiful world, while being born as God's children, who should fully inherit God's love, life, and lineage. Then I saw how tragically Adam and Eve had been tempted by a rebellious archangel, Lucifer, and how they fell into unprincipled self-centered love, the opposite of God's love for the sake others. The first human ancestors fell into into the false, unGodly love of the archangel, which led to their accusing and hating each other, as well as the serpent archangel. This then later led to the first murder, when Cain killed Abel.
History has always been working to solve this fundamental problem because the human being has an innate sense of conscience that always seeks goodness. Today this desire for the right and principled way is being pursued by those who realize that God needs true sons and true daughters to grow up pure and true to God's unchanging, eternal, unique and absolute love. I learned this by the life-long support I have received from Jesus and Heaven, who led me to meet the Original True Parents, Father and Mother Moon.
The Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Dr. Hak Ja Moon, have been taking responsibility to educate the whole world about God's ideal and how to realize it, and they have endured unimaginable hardships to fulfill this mission, which is exactly what Jesus and all others have endured when trying to tell the sinful world of God's ideal. But more than Jesus and other saintly people, the True Parents have been able to establish the foundation of God's blessing of marriage to create families of pure, unchanging, eternal true love. It's been done here on earth and can never be removed, indeed, the greatest victory of all time for God.
I know that my observations will probably elicit skepticism, maybe even hostility. Nevertheless, it is what I have personally experienced and thus is the core of my religious belief, as this thread has asked, "What are your religious beliefs?".
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