Eclipse of the moon

Sun Myung Moon kicked the bucket over the weekend, a colourful character who scaled the heights of cultism and plumbed the depths of tax evasion.

The debate continues of course, was he a great "spiritual" leader or a huckster on a global scale, I never really understood what "spiritual" means in such contexts so I'll lean towards the latter, and like most religious leaders its difficult to pin point the secret sauce of his success, but like all of them whatever he had his overarching skill was indisputably an ability to convince large numbers of people that he knew something they didn't.

Notionally "Christian" his Unification Church was created by him after some alleged conversations with "Jesus" back in the 50s although like most of these kinds of organisations its difficult to see beyond the flashy suits and the money grabbing media empire that it nurtured to any particularly useful non-recycled philosophy. No doubt most mainstream Christians saw him as the leader of a slightly sinister cult with dubious motives and he certainly fell out with the Catholic hierarchy over the years, however what most mainstream believers wouldn't accept is that from certain perspectives (like mine) the pattern of predation and exploitation of fellow social primates is probably explainable and certainly predictable, in fact, from this distance all religions look mostly the same.