A Happy and Blessed New Year to All! Over the holidays, I took some time for reading. One of the books I read was
"Heartbreak and Rage - Ten Years Under Sun Myung Moon" written by an ex Moonie. There were so many interesting parallels with my 10 years UBF experience. It would be great if someone could write such a book about UBF. I highly recommend the book to every UBFer. You can read a sample from the book
here.
When I read Steven Hassan's book (another ex Moonie)"Combatting Cult Mind Control", I found many parallels to UBF also. He described Sun Myung Moon as a short stocky Korean man who loved to watch Rocky movies with his top leaders and tell them how they needed to have Rocky's fighting spirit. He also tells how they used Genesis Ch. 22 to challenge him to "give up his Isaac" or something he really loved to do that conflicted with his spiritual life. In his case, it was his love for reading and writing poetry. He threw away all his poems, something he later regretted doing
I said that to say this: After reading Peter's letter, I began to write what I expected to be a 10- or 15-page letter confronting and denouncing him. I began writing it in September 2005. When I took a break from writing to go back to college in May 2006, my narrative had stopped at 126 handwritten, single-spaced pages. I'm almost at the point where the document is ready to edit - I think another 20 pages would allow me to finish writing the content and events I wanted to cover.
I hope to begin editing and revising the document during this summer and have something ready to post online later this year. I feel there is enough material for a book. Maybe, God willing, a book will grow out of my narrative.
One thing that you should get across is that it was not the problem of a single leader (Peter Chang) but the problem of the whole group and its top leader that created, tolerated and even suported such abusive leaders. UBF may argue that Peter Chang is part of the "Reform"/CMI movement but it must become clear that he did all these things *before* he (allegedly) became a "reformer" and that he was not a singular case in UBF, but probably more or less a typical UBF leader (not even the most extreme one like Peter Chang in Bonn). Anyway I'm curious about reading your experience.