My mother always cared about race relations. When she was 17, which was about 1941, she wrote a paper titled “Racial Issues in Our Democracy” for a final exam at a summer course at the “Keuka Summer Assembly.” The teacher, Rev. Charles Boddie, liked it and gave her and “A.” Here’s a link to tell us about Rev. Charles Boddie: Celebrating our Leadership Heritage in Black History Month: Part II – ABCUSA (abc-usa.org)

Of somewhat further interest that I discovered going through my mom’s mom’s old post cards and letters is a news clipping from the Utica Observer-Dispatch about the 1945-46 meetings of the Women’s Federation of the First Baptist Church of Herkimer, NY in which she (my grandmother – Mrs. Walter LaFayette) is listed as the president, and in particular that month of April was presenting a program called “A Visit to the Belgian Congo.”

Therefore, I reached the conclusion that my mother’s awareness of the problems in America and the world regarding race relations was simply a matter of Christian awareness and education carried on from her Christian multi-generational family conscience.

A few years before my mother passed away, I became interested in tracking down ancestors on my mother’s side and as we discovered she is a descendant of Miles Standish, the professional soldier hired by the pilgrims to be in charge of defense, without whom it can be argued that the pilgrims would have been wiped out by the local Native Americans. Read the very good book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War Hardcover – May 9, 2006 by Nathaniel Philbrick Surprisingly, the last chapter is named “Conscience,” which was the Christian name of an old Indian who was one of the last to surrender in King Phillip’s War.

The local newspaper wrote this about her when she passed away.

Erma Nordquist_Glens Falls, NY NAACP Photo

From left, Erma Nordquist, publicity chairman for Glens Falls NAACP branch, Roy Thomas, president, and Mildred Jackson, youth member, prepare to distribute a housing survey to about 7,000 area residents in April 1969. Nordquist, a cofounder of the Glens Falls NAACP branch, died March 14 at age 89. (Photo courtesy Glens Falls NAACP branch)

GLENS FALLS — The Post-Star reported on Feb. 8, 1967, that Erma Nordquist would appear on the WGY radio program “Voices of the Living Church” to discuss her resignation as chairwoman of the social action committee of the Glens Falls Area Council of Churches.

Nordquist said she was resigning and recommending the committee be disbanded because it had accomplished its mission of raising awareness of race relations.

She said local churches could use their resources more effectively by contributing to the newly formed Glens Falls NAACP branch, of which Nordquist was the founding secretary.

“A new stage in race relations in our area has now been reached,” she said. “We have brought the matter to the attention of many people and real progress has been made, at least, in the local confrontation.”

Nordquist, who died March 14 at age 89, was the woman local NAACP members always turned to for the history of the local branch, said Lee Braggs. vice president of the local NAACP branch.

“We weren’t around. We didn’t know about it,” he said. “She provided us with that.”

Nordquist, in a 1999 Post-Star interview, said that prejudice in Glens Falls in the 1960s informally segregated most blacks who lived in the city to a single neighborhood near Glens Falls Hospital.

“It was a soul-rending time,” she said in the 1999 interview.

The homes and apartments in the neighborhood were mostly torn down as part of the city’s Urban Renewal program in the 1970s.

The efforts of Nordquist and her committee gained momentum when, in April 1966, 350 parishioners of Glens Falls churches in conjunction with the annual “Brotherhood Sunday” activities, signed a “Fair Housing Pledge” agreeing to “welcome as a neighbor any responsible person (to the community) without regard to race, color or creed.”

Richard Bartlett said he and his mother, a nurse at Glens Falls Hospital, read news reports about Nordquist’s efforts and became charter members of the local NAACP.

“When I got out of law school and came back here, mother told me that she had just read about a survey that indicated that blacks had trouble buying or renting property in certain sections of the city,” he said. “She thought that was terrible. It was through that we got involved in the NAACP.”

Bartlett, who later served as a state assemblyman and a state judge, said Norquist was a very spiritual person.

“She was a quiet person. But she had very strong determination,” he said.

Nordquist was a longtime member of the First Baptist Church of Glens Falls and helped start its nursery school, according to a Post-Star obituary.

She and her husband also hosted children through the Fresh Air Fund.

Bartlett, George Champion, who worked for many years at the Glens Falls Civic Center, and Roy Thomas, the city’s former community development director, are the only three charter members still living, Braggs said.

In the 1960s, whites such as Nordquist, Bartlett and local clergy worked with blacks such as Champion and Thomas to launch the organization, he said.

“To be honest with you, if it wasn’t for the non-African American people, there would be no NAACP in Glens Falls,” he said.

Today, membership in the local NAACP still is about 50 percent white and 50 percent black, he said.

Braggs said Nordquist stayed active with the NAACP and consistently attended the branch’s scholarship galas held every two years.

“It wasn’t just a one-and-done deal way back then,” he said. “Erma was still active and participated as much as she could, up until the time she left this earth.”

[PS Listen to Erma’s Yoga audio tape made during her early years as a yoga teacher. https://youtu.be/LUu6VqE9IC4]

For those who might wonder what my background is and/or where I am coming from, I was raised in the First Baptist Church of Glens Falls, NY, by loving and extraordinary parents (Erma and Dean). I have three sisters and many cousins on both sides, who were also raised in various flavors of the Baptist Church. Some are Northern Liberal Baptists of the American Baptist Convention and some are persuaded more by the Southern Baptist persuasion. Because I haven’t interviewed them recently, I suppose that they all might take issue with my broad stroke of the brush.

As for myself, my father sat me down against the wall when I was 3. He sat down next to me and looking down at me, and I up at him, he said, “Now Peter, God is your real father, and he’s invisible, and he knows everything you’re thinking, and if you ever need any help, just ask him.” Somehow I already knew that, but it was good to know that he knew that too. That was Horace Dean Nordquist, who was 4 years varsity in 4 sports, and was inducted into the Odessa, NY Sports Hall of Fame. He attended the Senior Citizens Olympics in New York over the years and he passed away from undiagnosed bone cancer in 2015 at the age of 86.

Then he taught me the Lord’s Prayer and requested that I say it every night before I went to bed. He emphasized that when I got to the part in the prayer about forgiving others, that if my sister hit me or if I had a grudge against someone, that I needed to forgive her or give it up and that then God would also forgive me for my “debts.”  My father taught me that only once and never again checked on whether or not I was praying.

I prayed every night while growing up: God answered every prayer I ever prayed and still does.

A few years ago I learned that the shortest version of Jesus teaching his disciples how they should pray is in the Book of Mark and corresponds to what my father emphasized.

Mark 11 (English Standard Version)

25 And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”[a]

Northern Liberal Baptists read the Bible, pray about it, decide for ourselves what it means, and act according to the dictates of our consciences as informed by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This Father, Son and Holy Spirit, when interpreted as Heaven, Humanity – not only son, but also daughter – and Earth,  embraces the Trigrams of Oriental Philosophy.

A few years ago when there were at least 100 members of the local church at the meeting after the Sunday service, the woman pastor took a poll on the question of whether the Holy Spirit was masculine or feminine. Half thought one way, and the other half the other way, of course. Therefore the Holy Trinity basically means that God is a Nuclear Family God – thus Adam’s 8 member family (including Adam, Eve, their 3 sons and their wives), Noah’s 8 member family and the Cosmic Family of the 8 Trigrams of Oriental Philosophy.

So there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that constitute the only Lord, King or Queen of any individual and act through the person’s conscience. This is the Baptist Doctrine of Conscience that defeated the notion of the Divine Right of Kings and led to the American Revolution. The Baptist Doctrine of Conscience is the idea that formed the revolution in the minds of the people long before the actual American Revolution, as John Adams famously stated.

See https://www.wadeburleson.org/2022/01/a-revolution-that-began-in-hearts-and.html

which refers to “1750 A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and NonResistance to the Higher Powers: With some Reflections on the Resistance made to King Charles I. And on the Anniversary of his Death: In which the Mysterious Doctrine of that Prince’s Saintship and Martyrdom is Unriddled (1750). An Online Electronic Text Edition. Jonathan Mayhew A.M., D.D. West (Congregational) Church, Boston”

[https://lc.org/PDFs/A%20Discourse%20Concerning%20Unlimited%20Submission%20and%20Non-Resistance%20to%20the%20Higher%20Powers%20-%20Jonathan%20Mayhew%20-%201750.pdf

The VA Constitution of 1776 states:

“SEC. 16. That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.”

The political and religious significance of conscience did not just appear out of nowhere; it has a long history that includes The 30 years War and the entire history of world religions and cultural spheres.

Here’s a note on Thomas Helwys, one of the founders of the English Baptists:

Thomas Helwys (c. 1575 – c. 1616),^[1] an English minister, was one of the joint founders, with John Smyth, of the General Baptist denomination. In the early seventeenth century, Helwys was principal formulator of demand that the church and the state be kept separate in matters of law, so that individuals might have a freedom of religious conscience. Helwys was an advocate of religious liberty at a time when to hold to such views could be dangerous. He died in prison as a consequence of the religious persecution of Protestant Dissenters under King James I.^[1]

An earlier advocate of the Judeo/Christian concept of conscience was William Perkins (1558-1602) who wrote The Greatest Case of Conscience, who  in 1585 became a Lecturer of St Andrew the Great in Cambridge, a post he held until his death.

“Human laws bind not simply, but so far forth as they are agreeable to God’s Word, serve for the common good, stand with good order, and hinder not the liberty of conscience”
— William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (1596).^[2]

One of his students was John Robinson, the founder of congregationalism in Leiden and pastor of the group which went on to found the Plymouth Colony.

Even the Pilgrims were in pursuit of liberty of conscience and freedom of religion for everybody, already preparing the way for the American Revolution that had already occurred in their minds in the early 1600’s.

Shakespeare had Hamlet teach about conscience in MacBeth(1606):

Speech: “To be, or not to be, that is the question”

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

Read Catherine Belsey’s “The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience.”

The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience on JSTOR

In conclusion, the conniption fits that the world is experiencing today over politics, religion, science, economics and the media, have been anticipated and solved by considering the power of the individual conscience to tap into universal law that cannot change or be broken.

God didn’t want to live in a world without love, that’s why his steadfast love endures forever.

True Love (see The Princess Bride) requires faith during the period of growing to maturity, and willing cooperation between the parties who when mature are both able to give and receive love.

Love is based further on the concepts of truth, beauty and goodness, which pursued, produce happiness and joy, fulfilling the purpose of life.

Consider Jeremiah 31:31-34 [Old Testament] which is quoted in its entirety in Hebrews 8:8-12 [New Testament]

31 
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
    “when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
32 
It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
    though I was a husband to[d] them,[e]”
declares the Lord.
33 
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”

In my opinion this prophecy of Jeremiah, quoted also in Hebrews is speaking about the common man or woman’s enlightenment through knowing God, even the Root of a God who grew up (for Buddhists) and the purpose of Life through listening to their own infallible conscience.

[Unattributed quotes are most likely from Wikipedia about Baptist history]

Thank you for reading,
Peter Nordquist

Let us now look at another aspect of the Divine nature. In the Old Testament, Judaism emphasized the importance of an individual’s ties to his family and his nation. No one, the Jews insist, comes into God’s presence alone. When you find yourself with God, you discover that you are always with other people. Hence, God is never a private God. When He is your Heavenly Father, He is always “Our Father” at the same time. In other words, man lives in togetherness with others. No one is supposed to exist in isolation. Ultimately, God is not really interested in us as individuals. He is primarily interested in us as part of a larger community. As persons we constitute a unique network of relationships. We discover God in and through those relationships. In relating to one another on the most personal level we also encounter God. We should never think, I am what I am. Actually, I am because of you. All that I am is determined by what others are. We have our being in community.

Nevertheless, Unification theology goes far beyond a religion based upon social solidarity. Even though God is always our universal Father, it is possible to have a very private relationship with Him. A theology of polarity makes love central. Reinhold Niebuhr insisted that love is and has to be limited to direct person-to-person contacts. We simply cannot relate to a whole group with the closeness experienced toward specific individuals. 28 So our fellowship with God can be and should be based upon heart-to-heart contacts. That is why our likeness to God has been compared to the oneness of a husband and wife.

Look at this problem from another angle. When we first define the nature of God we usually describe Him as the Creator. He is God because He is the maker of heaven and earth. Or to quote Divine Principle, God is the universal prime energy. For this reason Tillich defines God as “the ground of being.” He is the creative source of everything which exists. According to Unification theology, God is more than simply the perpetual, self-generating energy which brings the whole creation into existence and is responsible for its maintenance.

Unification theology specifically reaffirms the very personal nature of God. When seen from the inside, our universe reveals the existence of a God of heart. God is not just “a Power that makes for righteousness,” 29 Not simply “the unmoved Mover” of Aristotle’s metaphysics. Not omnipotent Will. Not cosmic orderliness and natural law. Even if all of these terms tell us something about God, they do not point out His most important characteristic: the divine heart.

In our time, many religious people find it difficult to accept the idea that God is personal. “Isn’t that too anthropomorphic?” they ask. Because we are persons we try to remake the whole vast universe in a human image. Surely the nature of the cosmic process is as far superior to men’s understanding of it as an elephant’s view is different from that of an ant. What right then do we have to measure the universe by our petty human standards?

Suppose we grant that God’s nature is far more exalted than our own. We still have to measure Him by the highest we know. When we describe God as a person, we are admitting that He is like the best we can imagine. 30 By contrast, those who deny the personality of God often tend to explain His nature in less than human terms: as an impersonal cosmic force, for example.

Once we decide to ascribe to God qualities like our own, we face another problem. What human characteristics are the best? Since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, man’s nobility has been defined in terms of his reason. Reason makes us akin to the gods, it was said. But this is a highly intellectualist definition of the self. Isn’t there something greater about man than his ability to think?

Divine Principle claims that the heart is more fundamental than the mind. It is not so much what we think but how we feel that makes a man truly human. We are praised or judged by the depth and range of our emotions rather than how much we know. For this reason, the New Testament puts love at the top of the list of virtues, even higher up than faith.

Of the great modern Protestant theologians, Schleiennacher stressed the religion of heart. For him faith is not doctrine as the Lutheran scholastics claimed, nor is it simply ethics as Kant maintained. Faith is a warm living relationship between man and God. Religion is the intuition and feeling of absolute dependence, the experience of God-consciousness and becoming one with the infinite in the midst of the finite. 31

If the heart symbolizes the inner core of human personality, then God should be thought of in similar terms. Above all else, He is a God of heart. What does this mean? It means that our understanding of God must be based on an appreciation of human feelings. God feels at least as deeply as we feel. He is at least as sensitive to what goes on in the world as we are. If He is a God of heart, then He experiences the whole range of emotions from loneliness and intense grief to wonderful joy. If He is forgiving, He is also wounded by pain. God can love and express righteous indignation. Consequently, because God is a God of heart, He must be profoundly affected by everything which takes place in His creation.

This explains why Unification thought, like process theology, refuses to define God as simply almighty and all-knowing. 32 The conventional meanings of these attributes ignore the fact of polarity. God is not omnipotent. His power is far greater than man’s but it is limited by His own nature and His cosmic laws. God is not free to violate His essential relatedness because that is part of His very being. Also, man was created in such a way that he can restrict God’s purpose. Our responsiveness can determine the effectiveness of God’s acts in history. As Jesus showed, if a man does not have faith even God cannot heal his sickness. Man’s response to the divine initiative can either frustrate or bring to fruition the intent of God. God’s will can be hindered for a time when we do not act responsibly. However, we can be certain that God will ultimately triumph. His method of persuasion will eventually win men over to His side so that the purpose of creation will be realized.

Nor is God completely all-knowing. His omniscience, like His omnipotence, has to be qualified by man’s free will. God does not know everything that will happen because even though He wills some result it cannot take place if we do not cooperate. Yet God is omniscient in one very important respect. He knows all possibilities. Nothing we may do ever surprises Him. 33

Most of the world’s great faiths have given some recognition to the heart of God. One can find it expressed in Hasidic Judaism, Sufi Islam, bhakti Hinduism and some forms of Mahayana Buddhism. At the same time modern religions have often opposed belief in the God of heart in the name of reason or divine transcendence. Therefore by highlighting the centrality of heart in our understanding of God and man, Divine Principle makes a profound contribution to modern theology.

About the Author, Dr. Young Oon Kim

Dr. Young Oon Kim was born in 1915 on Hwang-Hae Island in Korea. After she graduated in Theology from Kanzai University in Japan she became professor of Christology at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul. In 1948 she received a Master’s degree in Theology from Emanuel College, Toronto University and in December of the same year an Honorary Doctor’s degree in Humanism from Richard College.

From 1975 on she taught Systematic Theology at the Graduate School of the Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, New York [and later at the Sung Hwa Theological Seminary in Korea]. Some of her most important publications are: Unification Theology and Christian Thought, Divine Principle and its Application, World Religions Volume I, II, and III, Unification Theology, An Introduction to Theology, and The Types of Modern Theology.

https://youtu.be/pqkx7ZVOWYc

[The following is a wonderful excerpt from a Sunday Sermon given by Rev. Sun Myung Moon on Sept. 20, 1992 in New York. The link to the complete talk is at the end.]

It may be easy to say that Father should love Cain first and then Abel, but human beings are simply not built that way. Also Father must be able to deeply care about the women in the Unification Church in his heart and do that more than he loved his own wife when he married Mother. The same is true for America, too. You may be indifferent to it, but it is a very important nation. So you must love Cain more than Abel. It is not easy. It is like dying, but you have to do it, and so does the mother in loving the stepchildren first.

God gave His own son in order to restore all those who were enemies to Him. God did that Himself. Therefore He can tell us, “Love thy enemy.” That’s why Jesus was the greatest in history. Those whom he tried to love the most were the ones who pierced him, and he still said, “Do not blame them because they do not know what they are doing.” We must understand Jesus’ heart to restore God’s peace, God’s family peace. This was the only way, so Jesus did it. He did it for the sake of God’s family. We must understand what he did, what is great in reality, and do the same things for the same reasons. We have to understand the reasons why he loved the enemy. He did it to preserve God’s family.

We understand how this applies. If you fail in a marriage but you already have a child, and then you marry for the second time, you will bring your son or daughter to a new husband. If his family does not welcome you and your child, how difficult would your life be? God is exactly the same. We must understand that we must love. This is only possible because of God. It is very important that we hear and understand this. It is easy to hear the words, but do you really understand it? Maybe you do understand it, but then it has to simmer in, sink down into yourself. Correct? You have to listen and listen again with seriousness so that you can seriously understand, not superficially understand.

This is why the early Christians had to leave their homes and go out to foreign countries and evangelize. Then the people listened to them. But people in their own homes didn’t listen to them. Rome was Jesus’ enemy. Do you know why we say love your enemy? It is because there are lots of stepchildren who came about, so how can God accommodate them if He does not teach them how to love their enemy and help them practice doing that? So at this last Blessing, I really did not discriminate. The Blessing was not given only to Unification Church members. I wanted to give the Blessing to members and non-members. I extended the love of the family to non-family. Then they became family. (Applause)

So we must understand that Father is representing all the children of God, and the perfection of heart. He is like the king on the throne, the center of all the children, which is what all mankind is. Including Father and everyone of us, all mankind, has everything to do with God, and nothing to do with Satan. Here Father stands as the one who represents all the good brother and sister relationships, as well as the most perfected man and the most perfected heart of a husband. In other words, he should be the best husband in the whole world. When this is materialized, would Mother be a happy or an unhappy woman? (Happy.) Should Father stand in a position where Mother can frown and say, “You are not a good enough husband”? Or should I treat her in such a way that she can always say, “You are the best one. I respect you.” That kind of father and husband is what I should be. Actually, I have to become such that Mother, whenever her mouth opens in spite of herself, starts praising her husband. Everywhere she goes, she wants to brag and talk about her husband. When she became a grandmother, she wanted to speak about her husband even more and be even more proud.

Father also has a reason to be proud of Mother. Representing all of mankind, she obeyed Father more than any woman here on earth. I am now in a position which God has long been desiring to see and I am bequeathing that to all men and women, allowing them to become sons and daughters of God. God created man and woman to be that way in the original Blessing. Now that mankind has come under Him, He wants to give man the power of creation too. When man is perfected, he can realize God’s heart. To share that feeling, God gives parents sons and daughters. Of course you always have the original text, but pay attention to this, and engrave it in your heart and in your mind. Do not forget it.

(Father draws for a while on the board.) This is the four position foundation. This is God and God has mind and body but it is invisible. He has to deploy His own self in His own image through a visible self, namely sons and daughters. In doing this, one is plus and one is minus. They have a relationship of plus and minus. For this to happen, a person in the position of plus must first deny themselves. If someone is a plus here on earth, he cannot become a plus in spirit world. Therefore, on earth he must become a minus, then he will become a plus in heaven. That is on the heartistic realm. That means that here on earth, if we live almost miserably, serving all mankind and everybody here, then when you go to the other world, spirit world, heaven, you will be raised up to the highest point, depending on how low you were here. This happens by living for the sake of others.

This is highly conceptual, but if a man loves a woman very much, the woman will love him so much so that there is a way for him to go directly to heaven. There is more than one way to go. That’s the Kingdom of Heaven-you can go many ways. By the same token, she can do this. We must understand that what we experience here and what we will experience there are not the same as we think. If we live here as a millionaire, do you think we will also live like a millionaire up there? No. Usually, it is reversed. Why? Because if we don’t live for the sake of other people, how can we go up high in the spirit world? Do you follow? The ordinary person doesn’t understand that.

America, in other words, the West, is kind of plus here on earth today. Since they are a plus, they cannot go here and become a plus. They are already a plus here, so they have to go to a minus position. Then they can go to plus even if they go to spirit world. Once you reach up high, you’ve got to find carefully where your low position is. You have to find it and go down. The only way is that low position, not a high position. That is the rhythm of all life. First you have to come low before you become high. When you go high, then you must always come down low. If we live here on earth for the sake of other people, we will go so much higher in the spirit world. That’s what the essence is.

This is God, this is children (pointing to blackboard). That is, Adam and Eve. The reciprocal subject and object ideal is here. Here is an individual. Here they are a pair, but here is an individual. That means when Adam was born as a boy or as a man-to-be, he goes his own way. By the same token, Eve has her own path to follow as she is growing up. Adam and Eve do not go by themselves. They have to bring their parents along with them. This is important for everyone. After each person is born, he or she has to go through the stage of the true brothers and sisters. They must become a true brother and sister, a good brother and sister. Do any parents want to see their sons and daughters fighting with one another? That is the most painful thing. Actually, the parents’ heart wants to see the brothers and sisters loving one another even more than they love their parents. The same is true of the animal world. Animal parents don’t want their children to fight. What about here in America? Of course, we got so individualistic, it’s hard for us to understand this.

This is the original formula. We are born as children. Then we must first become good brothers and sisters, always keeping God in mind. You should not forget God. No matter what they do, good or bad, they have to keep God in mind always while they are growing up. As they grow from small children, getting older and older, they develop not only their children’s heartistic attitude toward their parents but also their heartistic position as brothers and sisters. They soon come to play two roles, that of children and that of brothers and sisters. Why is that so important? You might think that these are just a few childhood years, but they are very important. While we are growing in our family, we have to have rigid, perfect training. There are hundreds of millions of families in the world. Unless you are accustomed to correct relationships within the family, you cannot relate to all of them peacefully.

So we can now categorize these relationships. The love between parents and children is vertical love. The love between husband and wife is that of left and right, or horizontal. And the love between brothers and sisters is that of front and rear. All of those comprise a sphere, correct? Our heartistic training is supposed to lead us to perfection. Therefore, the family is indeed the training ground, the perfect textbook. It is the textbook of father, the textbook of mother and the textbook of brothers and sisters, all four different kinds of relationships.

Of course, that expands into the world with the grandfather’s heartistic world, the grandsons, and in-laws, stepsons and daughters, uncles and aunts. Extended family relationships reflect your attitude toward the rest of mankind.

I have just outlined the basic kinds of relationships there are and what kinds of attitudes you should maintain in those relationships. When you pass this, and when you pass this extended application, you will become a person about whom God can say to others, “You should learn from him. He is the typical example of My love.”

That means I, too, must be able to look at the elderly grandfathers and grandmothers here in America and really feel the same kind of affection, the same love, even stronger toward these grandparents, than towards my own grandparents. I should look at them as my own father and mother. Likewise, in all different age groups, I feel the extension of my own family. When that is the case, I would have passed all the tests of God and everybody would try to follow my example. I have the confidence that if God told me, “I want you to take that shabbiest, most unappealing old grandmother into your home and take care of her as your own grandmother. That’s your grandmother” I would obey. I would treat her better than my own grandmother. By the same token, those who are the age of my own parents, if God told me to take care of somebody, I would be ready to do it, no matter how difficult it might be.

If True Mother had been a black woman, rather than a Korean, would I have loved her any less? No, it doesn’t matter what her race or culture is, I must love the woman in Mother’s position the most. Whenever I see a black brother or sister, I think, “Oh, that person’s ancestors went off many, many generations ago and lived in a very hot climate and became dark-skinned, but they are my kinfolk. How much difficulty they must have gone through generation after generation!” Because of this basic heartistic attitude and understanding and willingness, the Unification Church can have successful international marriages. If you don’t understand this basic attitude, then this is meaningless.

So the son and daughter grow, brother and sister becoming bigger and more mature. Adam is the one who is to be the perfected son, and Eve is the one who is to be the perfected daughter. Both were children of God. Adam was to grow up to be in the elder brother’s position, and Eve was in the younger sister’s position. After mastering the heartistic relationship as a son and daughter to the parents, then as brother and sister to one another, they would have been ready to become husband and wife, heartistically ready for that level of relationship between husband and a wife.

We must understand, not everybody is qualified to become a husband and wife just because they grow up to be a man and a woman. Only God’s son and daughter are allowed to become husband and wife. In order to become God’s, not Satan’s, son and daughter, we have to experience the other levels of relationship before becoming husband and wife.

Why have I mentioned this in such an elaborate way? Because here are American women who think, “Well, I am a woman and therefore I am entitled to have a husband.” But that is not the case at all. Have you loved your parents according to God’s heavenly way? Have you loved your brothers and sisters in a heavenly way? Are you prepared to love your husband in a heavenly way? There is only one Adam and one Eve. Another example of what American women say is, “Oh, there are millions of people I can choose from, or Father can choose from.” No, no, there is only one Adam and one Eve. There is no other possibility. If you meet your husband, he is your Adam. There is no second runner-up, there is no alternative.

Here there is no spouse (pointing to area of blackboard) or no plus and minus, subject and object relationship. We go from one extreme to another extreme, one direction to another. This is East and this is West. There is no spouse. This is single. All are single until they get married. So it is a big task for us to become dual characteristics, like God. God has dual characteristics, both man and woman’s characteristics. Each man has woman’s characteristics, as well.

Adam might have tremendous aspirations and ambitions, no matter what. Maybe in Adam’s time, if there had been such a possibility, he would have gone on to get a Ph.D. Whatever he might do, his ultimate requirement is that he has to find a wife, get married to another person. Adam and Eve actually didn’t think about one another as husband and wife. They were independent of each other. The love of parents was more superior for them. Anyway, they never thought about getting married. After a while, it dawned on Adam that perhaps he could take Eve as his wife, after observing nature and seeing that everything in nature comes in pairs. That’s how they gradually came to think, “Maybe she/he is meant to be my mate.” Then later they came to realize, “It must be.” As they grew it became clear.

When they approach this level of maturity, when they are about ready to be Blessed in marriage by God, the vertical line shortens up and God comes down here also. Adam and Eve come up and toward that one focal point. And where should Adam and Eve meet? You may think, here, or here or that any point on this line would be okay. But that is not so. Adam and Eve have to meet right here at the center. There is no other point. That’s why they are ninety degrees. By doing that, there is the most natural approach. There is no loss. That’s the most effective, most economical way. It’s a shortcut all around. That is the ideal, that is ninety degrees.

If you envision that in the sphere, then the twelve independent pieces will still make a perfect sphere, no matter which piece you may fit in which position. Everybody likes this one position, God likes it, father and mother like it, children like it, brothers and sisters like it. When a husband and wife spend their first night together, God comes down right here and with them, forms a nuclei. This is the settling point of the love of all positions. The parent’s love and parent’s position is here, children’s love and children’s position is here, the couple’s position is here; the focus of all love settles down from this point on and God becomes the center, the nuclei.

This is what God intended: the culminating point of His ideal of creation. From here, everything is connected and extended in all directions. We can see a tremendous multiplication which will form a world full of billions of people. Therefore it is very natural and we cannot deny, that in order to reach that point, mind and body must become one or else we just cannot serve the purpose. To serve True Love, mind and body must have complete unification. The upper sphere, lower sphere, the right sphere, left sphere, front sphere and rear sphere, completely combine centered on True Love. It’s true. Therefore it is a tremendous pride and privilege to have sons and daughters because we have to have this rigid standard of God’s love before we are allowed to have children. It is the original standard, the original attitude of God’s position. God gave all things this ability as He made the creation. How enjoyable it was to be in Adam’s position! God wanted to give them His same feeling of joy, that is the position to be a couple and to bear children. Now you are experiencing God’s position.

Father looked for the truth and he was amazed to finally realize that there was nothing God did not give to everybody. Everybody had and has the potential to experience God’s position himself. There is nothing God reserved for Himself. You want your truly loving father and truly loving mother to be a king and queen, don’t you? Everybody answers the same, Yes! Yes! Emphatically you would answer, “I want my father to be king.” You also want your grandfather and grandmother to become a king and queen, don’t you? And also, you want your spouse to become a king and you become a queen. You want that, don’t you? How about your children? It is the same answer. That is the privilege God bestowed to all mankind, all children, without exception. You are rightfully eligible to have that. If Adam and Eve didn’t fall, God would have been the king Himself. The king’s son and daughter are a prince and princess, aren’t they? Literally Adam and Eve would have been that prince and princess, on the way to becoming king and queen one day. This is not just thought, but reality.

When they succeeded in growing up in a good manner and became husband and wife and king and queen, only one nation under God would have existed throughout millions of generations. There never would have been two countries or three countries, or like today when we see hundreds of countries. Should there have been one country or two countries? (One.) Would America exist as it does today? No. It would have been a part of God’s country. One country would exist centered on Adam’s culture. One culture, one country; one kingship country. The citizens or subjects would all be royal families, deployed everywhere centering on one center. They would become the so-called population.

Now Father is telling us the concept of king and queen is not so distant. We can see already, we must be kings and queens because our parents are kings and queens. We are the offspring of kings and queens and eventually we will be too. This is literally how God created. How different it is: what we are today and what we are supposed to be!
https://tparents.org/Moon-Talks/SunMyungMoon92/920920.htm

After studying Euclid’s Elements for a day or two, I realized how, 2400 years ago, they might have approached the proof of what I have taken the liberty of calling NordaVinci’s Formula for the Area of a Right Triangle – until if and when the rightful owner of this formula emerges as someone in history who noticed it before I did, which is becoming harder and harder to believe that there wasn’t at least someone in the last 2400 or more years.

Looking at the famous Proposition 47 of Book I of Euclid, which is basically the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, I realized that it’s very simple, once one asks the question to realize that R(H + R) = X(H – X) would be immediately recognized 2,400 years ago as the dimensions of two rectangles whose areas are equal but with differently proportioned sides. R being the radius of the inscribed circle, H being the hypotenuse and X and H- X being the segments of the hypotenuse from the tangent point to the hypotenuse of the inscribed circle.

By cutting out the 6 inner right triangles and rearranging them around the rectangle formed by the two segments of the hypotenuse, a second bigger rectangle is formed whose edges are equal to the two legs of the bigger right triangle, the product of which is twice the area of the bigger right triangle. Thus it simply must be that the product of the two segments of the hypotenuse also equal the area of the bigger right triangle.

It looks like Philo’s Line can be drawn as below, using only a straightedge and a compass, by virtue of knowing NordaVinci’s Formula for the Area of a Right Triangle, which can be used to show that the two tangent points 1) the inscribed circle tangent point to the hypotenuse, and 2) the escribed circle tangent point to the hypotenuse, are equidistant from the endpoints of the hypotenuse on each end.

“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s another giant step forward in the history of trigonometry!

It comes right on the heels of NordaVinci’s Formula for the Area of a Right Triangle! We have just noticed, ladies and gentlemen, that not only the inscribed circle of a right triangle, but also the escribed circle of the same right triangle, are tangent to the hypotenuse at points that are equidistant from the center of the circumscribed circle of the same right triangle!

That might have been noticed before! But I didn’t notice it before! Now that I have, we also have to realize, that the two tangent points, one on the inscribed circle and one on the escribed circle are also the same distance from the two vertices of the right triangle that constitute the endpoints of the diameter of the circumscribed circle. (see picture)

Then there is the the further amazing fact of NordaVinci’s Formula for the Area of a Right Triangle being applied not only with respect to the tangent point of the inscribed circle, but also to the tangent point of the escribed circle!

Both tangent points serve the same function in that they divide the hypotenuse into two line segments, the product of whose lengths is the area of the right triangle!

Further interesting, and a previously recorded fact, is that the radius of the escribed circle opposite the right angle is equal to the inscribed circle radius plus the hypotenuse, which is none other than the famous semiperimeter of the right triangle, meaning obviously that the product of the inscribed radius and the escribed radius (the one just mentioned) is also equal to the area of the right triangle!

Dumbfounding! Amazing! and Flabbergasting!

By the way, I discovered a new, previously completely unknown formula for the area of a right triangle. I call it “NordaVinci’s Formula.” Here it is R(R + H) = X(H – X). Here’s a link to my “NordaVinci’s Cat” poster with the Cat thinking about the derivation of NordaVinci’s Formula, that you can purchase for $20 – the poster, not the Cat. Be one of the first in the world to know something about the Right Triangle that is not in the Elements of Euclid Math Book or any other Math Book in Human History! Be one of the first to be able to brag to your trigonometry teacher that you know something that he or she doesn’t know about the area of a right triangle! Sell the poster to your teacher for only $30. Profits are for a non-profit group involving math, science and technology!

NordaVinci’s Formula is not simpler. That’s what kept it hidden for these many thousands of years – nobody cared, nobody needed to know it, and there was a simpler formula.

The interesting thing is that when I began to investigate, thinking that this must be common knowledge and I can’t imagine that I am the first person in recorded human history to notice this, I went to mathworld online reference and noticed in the footnotes the mention of Baker from 1884 who had collected a list of 130 different formulas for the area of a triangle, none of which is NordaVinci’s Formula.

REFERENCES:

Baker, M. “A Collection of Formulæ for the Area of a Plane Triangle.” Ann. Math. 1, 134-138, 1884.

I sent questions to some experts who didn’t bother to respond as of yet, and unless I pay somebody a few thousand dollars to do a literature search of extant scholarly journals, I won’t know if anyone in the world today ever wrote about this as something that was already discovered.

The brief point of NordaVinci’s Formula that was unknown is the right side of the equation. The left side was known already and easy to see from the diagram. The right side is simply X(H-X), which was unknown as the Area of a Right Triangle. That means that the tangent point of the inscribed circle to the hypotenuse, divides the hypotenuse into two line segments, of which the product of their lengths equals the area of the triangle.

That’s the actual contribution to the History of Trigonometry, that was lurking there just waiting to be discovered, waving its hand in the air, shouting, “Here I am!!!”

But nobody until me noticed it, apparently.

[9/11 prophesied in 1985]

I have a spiritual son named Jon Hildreth in Glens Falls, NY, my hometown, where I now live. He was born in 1974, the year I joined the UC. He and his whole family are quite spiritual and attended the First Baptist Church of Glens Falls, the church that I also grew up in and taught Sunday School at when I was in the 12th grade.

Jon had a spiritual visitor who came into his room at night when he was growing up. His older sister, who was about 16 at the time that Jon was 10, claims that she could hear two voices through the wall separating her room from Jon’s. This visitor was not just a dream or a vision that only Jon could see and hear.

The visitor told Jon to wait until the two towers fell and that then he would meet a man named David, dressed in blue, who would give him a scroll.

Over the years when I was sometimes in my hometown, I would visit my First Baptist Church on Sunday. When I first joined, I prayed that Rev. A. King Wise who had pastored the church and had died in the 1960’s be able to study Divine Principle in the spirit world. In my dream at night I gave him a Divine Principle book. A couple years later, he returned in my dream and gave the book back to me, saying that he didn’t understand it.

Then in the late 1990’s I had a vision of the official big picture of Rev. Wise that remained in front of me for about 5 minutes. Taking this as a sign that he now understood Divine Principle, I attended more regularly the First Baptist Church.

Then after 9/11 while at a church meeting there, I met Jon Hildreth for the first time. He is the church historian. I had my blue suit on and a Divine Principle book in my hand and some of my comparative religion Tree of Life diagrams. He responded quite well and I gave him the Divine Principle book and told him that it might take him 40 years to accomplish his mission.

He is quite a spiritual brother as I said before, who also sees auras. So in conclusion, even though I am not named David, I was dressed in blue and gave him a scroll – the Divine Principle.

Also to point it out again, in case you missed it in the above narrative, Jon was 10 years old in 1985, when his spiritual visitor told him to “wait until the two towers fell, and then he would meet a man named David dressed in blue who would give him a scroll.” This was a prophecy given to him in 1985, while Rev. Moon Sung Myung was in Danbury Prison, that the World Trade Center would be destroyed.

Here’s a somewhat blurry photo of Jon and me at the First Baptist Church in Glens Falls NY around that time, with me wearing my blue suit.

This book of Rev. Wise’s excellent sermons was compiled by Rev. Calvin C. Wilson after Rev. Wise’s passing on Sept. 18, 1967 (born 1920). Exactly 7 years later, Rev. Moon, Sung-Myung delivered the sermon “The New Future of Christianity” to over 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden.

As is sometimes the case with the premature departure to the eternal world of the spirit, Rev. Wise’s illness and death at 47, leaving his wife and young children behind, perhaps constituted some small indemnity condition for American Christianity to hear God’s message to revive America, delivered on that day by Rev. Moon. His message closed with an earnest request to pray and ask God directly to “know if Reverend Moon is telling the truth.”

[Excerpt]

Ladies and gentlemen, I have come here to Madison Square Garden tonight in obedience to God’s command. The Bible says: And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’ (Acts 2:17)

We are living in such an extraordinary time, at the birth of a new age! Heaven is quite near. And if you earnestly call upon God, He will answer you.

You must urgently ask Him, “How can I know if Reverend Moon is telling the truth?” Do not let me or anyone else answer that question for you. Let God answer you directly.
So go in peace, and please ask God earnestly, sincerely. Confront God in prayer. God will reveal the answer to you.

The new hope for mankind is the Messiah. And that “great and terrible day of the Lord” is at hand. It is up to you whether that day will be great or terrible. If you meet the Messiah, for you that day will be great. But if you fail to meet him, then for you that day will indeed be terrible.

God bless you. Thank you for your attentive listening.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V8CjYAw9leZNM2K9y8kV3lqm1xNi3M3T