Posts Tagged ‘Moon’
Thousands marry in first ‘post-Moon’ Unification Church mass wedding
Sunday, 17 February 2013 09:19
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Thousands of Unification Church members got married in a mass wedding in South Korea Sunday — the first since the death of their “messiah” and controversial church founder Sun Myung Moon.

Some 3,500 identically-dressed couples — many of mixed nationality who had met just days before — took part in the ceremony at the church’s global headquarters in Gapyeong, east of the capital Seoul.

Mass weddings, some held in giant sports stadia with tens of thousands of couples, have long been a signature feature of the church and one that “Moonie” critics have pointed to as evidence of cult underpinnings. (Read more…)

Sunday’s event carried a special resonance, with Moon’s 70-year-old widow Hak Ja Han presiding for the first time without her husband who died five months ago, aged 92, of complications from pneumonia.

The church’s mass weddings began in the early 1960s. At first, they involved just a few dozen couples but the numbers mushroomed over the years.

In 1997, 30,000 couples tied the knot in Washington, and two years later around 21,000 filled the Olympic Stadium in Seoul.

Nearly all were personally matched by Moon, who taught that romantic love led to sexual promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies.

Many were married just hours after meeting for the first time, and Moon’s preference for cross-cultural, international marriages meant that they often shared no common language.

In recent years, matchmaking responsibilities have shifted towards parents, but 400 of the church members married on Sunday had chosen to be paired off a few days before at an “engagement ceremony” presided over by Moon’s widow.

“Yeah, I was pretty nervous,” admitted Jin Davidson, a 21-year-old student from the United States, whose Australian father and Japanese mother were matched by Moon.

“Then all of a sudden she popped up in front of me, and I said okay,” Davidson said of his Japanese bride-to-be, Kotona Shimizu, also 21.

“We struggle a little to communicate right now, as I speak no Japanese at all, and she only speaks a little English, but we see it as an exciting challenge and proof of our faith,” he said.

Those who choose to be matched by the church must confirm under oath that they are virgins, and after their wedding the couple must refrain from sexual relations for a minimum of 40 days.

In a sign of the church moving with the times, Lisa, from Trinidad and Tobago, first met her bridegroom, Hubert from Poland, on Skype after being put in contact by family and church friends.

Hubert visited her family in December and the couple decided to attend Sunday’s event in South Korea to receive the blessing of “mother Moon”.

“I’ve been waiting for him all my life,” Lisa said. “Language isn’t such an issue. We’re connected by the church.”

The ceremony was held in the same vast, covered stadium where Moon’s elaborate funeral was held on September 15.

The musical warm up acts were an eclectic mix, including a rousing version of “Libiamo..,” the drinking song from La Traviata, some Buddhist chanting and a children’s choir singing “Oh Happy Day”.

Hak Ja Han entered to the strains of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus and led the couples in their vows. Another 12,000 couples around the world took part via a live Internet feed.

Revered by his followers but denounced by critics as a charlatan who brainwashed church members, Moon was a deeply divisive figure whose shadowy business dealings saw him jailed in the United States.

The teachings of the Unification Church are based on the Bible but with new interpretations, and Moon saw his role as completing the unfulfilled mission of Jesus to restore humanity to a state of “sinless” purity.

While it claims a worldwide following of three million, experts suggest the core membership is far smaller.

 
Scientists: Giant smashup created the Moon
Wednesday, 17 October 2012 14:12
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A chemical quirk found in lunar soil backs a 37-year-old theory that the Moon was born from an apocalyptic collision between Earth and a huge space rock, scientists said on Wednesday.

Way back in 1975, astronomers proposed at a conference that billions of years ago, our satellite was created through a smashup between the infant Earth and a Mars-sized body they named Theia, in Greek mythology the mother of the moon, Selene.

The collision melted and vaporised Theia and much of Earth’s nascent mantle, and the rock vapour condensed to form the Moon. (Read more…)

This would explain why the Moon is so big — it is about a quarter the size of Earth and the fifth biggest satellite in the Solar System — and so near to us.

For years, the “Giant Impact Theory” lingered in the margins until computer simulations showed that it could be true.

Sifting through precious grains of lunar soil brought back by the Apollo missions, researchers say they have now found chemical proof to validate the concept.

It lies in a minute excess in a heavier isotope, or atomic variant, of the element zinc.

This enrichment would have happened because heavier zinc atoms would have been condensed swiftly in the vapour cloud rather than lighter ones.

The tiny but telltale difference is called isotopic fractionation.

“The magnitude of the fractionation we measured in lunar rocks is 10 times larger than what see in terrestrial and martian rocks,” said Frederic Moynier, an assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

“It’s an important difference.”

The fractionation was sought in 20 samples of lunar rocks from four Apollo missions, which explored different areas of the Moon, and from one lunar meteorite.

These were matched against 10 meteorites that have been identified as being martian in origin, including one that was in collection at the Vatican, and against rocks found on Earth.

Analysis by a mass spectrometer — in which light from a vaporised sample points to the elements in it — showed that zinc in general was severely depleted on the Moon, but bore the signatures of heavier isotopes.

Large-scale evaporation of the zinc points to a mega-event like the collision, rather than localised volcanic activity, the researchers contend.

“You require some kind of wholesale melting event of the Moon to provide the heat necessary to evaporate the zinc,” said James Day of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

With this success, say the researchers, the Great Impact Theory could be the key to understanding another mystery: why is Earth so endowed with water but the Moon so dry?

“This is a very important question, because if we are looking for life on other planets, we have to recognise that similar conditions are probably required,” said Day.

“So understanding how planets obtain such conditions is critical for understanding how life ultimate occurs on a planet.”

The study appears in the British journal Nature.

 
The Forgotten Anti-Moon-Landing Movement
Wednesday, 19 September 2012 08:00
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Many look back on the Apollo 11 lunar landing as a crowning achievement of humanity and pinnacle of a time when America was able to unite and accomplish great things. But the Atlantic points out that there was widespread public discontent over the propagandistic aspects and vast expense spent on the moon mission while the most basic problems of life on Earth went unaddressed:

We’ve told ourselves a convenient story about the moon landing and national unity, but there’s almost no evidence that our astronauts united even America, let alone the world. Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we’ve gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979. (Read more…)

Many black papers questioned the use of American funds for space research at a time when many African Americans were struggling at the margins of the working class. An editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel, for example, argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, “It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of ‘progress’ and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all).”