Talk:Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church

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Huge numbers[edit]

400 million couples blessed in 2004? Wouldn't that be 800 million people... or something like 12% of the world's population at the time? Coupled with the 1998-99 "360 million" blessing, this'd mean about 25% of the planet had been married by the Unification Church. How is this possible?69.9.16.28 21:34, 17 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, the numbers cited here are nowhere near plausible, by that count this little known Christian denomination has held Blessing Ceremonies for about 75% of the world's Christians. This needs some serious fact checking. Ttrygve 19:51, 25 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Blessings were religious ceremonies - not legal rituals. Rev. Moon had no legal standing to "perform a marriage" in a legal sense. Besides, wouldn't he get writer's cramp signing thousands of marriage licenses?

Everyone, without exception, had to "get married" according to the laws of their own country (either before or after the Blessing ceremony). --Uncle Ed 14:56, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible for the Blessing ceremony to also be a wedding ceremony. The couple just needs to get a marriage license first. The pastor of our local UC does this quite often. I guess the laws vary state to state. The hundreds of millions of couples Blessed mostly means a Blessing was given to their already existing marriages, not that they all were married in the UC or are members. Steve Dufour 18:39, 10 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Steve, those numbers are suspiciously high, no matter how generously you take into account that the couples weren't necessarily getting married for the first time. Reference #2 in Unification church says the church itself only claims 3 million followers, and you can bet that's a generous estimate. To have 400 million couples be blessed in 2004, their members would have had to average 66 blessings/"marriages" per couple in just one year, and that's assuming every follower of the church is married. At the very least, this data should be backed up by something far more authoritative than a text file on Coman's AT&T personal home page. Ttrygve 17:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I went ahead and took the list off. I was the one who wrote it in the first place. As the article says, couples not in the church can now also receive the Blessing. This is the reason for the large number of couples in recent years. Steve Dufour 13:32, 2 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. -- Ttrygve 16:25, 2 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

User:Ttrygve's saying the "numbers are suspiciously high" because of a misunderstanding (that you clarified for him and that I hopefully clarified for readers by adding subcategories) is not a reason to delete numbers. I think an article on this subject should contain some numbers. The numbers have been reported in many publications. The calendar may be criticized by some as a borderline WP:RS, but it's not original research. Steve, if you're disinclined to put the list back (in two sections, each part in the new sub-sections), I think the article at least needs a few more numbers. -Exucmember 02:54, 3 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, this article absolutely should have numbers, I would love to see them myself, that's why I only flagged the section originally, rather than deleting it. But I disagree on whether it was a borderline WP:RS issue, it seemed a perfectly clear cut example of WP:RS#Self-published sources. If a reliable source can be found, I would have preferred to just fix it. I also think it would be helpful to get some context on how they claim to be achieving such high numbers. Sure, non-Church members are welcomed to partake in Blessing Ceremony's as well, but why are they choosing to do so in such allegedly high numbers? A Church claiming 3 million members has somehow convinced 400 million couples (by my estimates, that's about 13% of the global population, or 38% of all Christians) to partake in a wedding-like ceremony that takes 40 days to complete? That's a seriously difficult to swallow claim, and needs to be explained and verified. Ttrygve 13:01, 3 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • I thought the source was an official, printed church calendar, authored by Katheryn Koman. (Is this right?) If so, I'd guess a thousand, maybe several thousand copies were printed. I'm not sure I understand the difference between this and a book published by the church with the same information. But many if not all of the numbers have been published elsewhere also.
  • Context is important. In the later, huge-numbers blessings, there were some cases where people didn't know they were participating in the blessing. In other cases they didn't know they were participating in anything at all. (For example, free drinks spiked with a tiny amount of holy wine were passed out at a soccer game in Korea. An estimate was made of how many people were "blessed").
  • I don't think most of those involved in the blessings with the largest numbers were doing something for 40 days. It was more likely a 3-minute encounter between church members and people they didn't know at a table in a public place. -Exucmember 03:52, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Katheryn's UC calendar is really a website. It does seem to be semi-official since the official sites include it in their list of links. Numbers are more difficult. In the main UC article it says the number of church members world-wide is anywhere from 250,000 to 3,000,000. Also there are non-members who are very serious about the Blessing, as well as many (probably most as Exucmember said) who don't have any idea what it is. This is a source of controversy within the church, as the article suggests. Steve Dufour 11:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Just to clarify, you'll notice I said that in the blessings with the largest numbers I thought "some" people didn't know they were participating in the blessing, and "most" people didn't do something for 40 days. Doesn't the FFWPU site have numbers? That would certainly be official. -Exucmember 03:19, 5 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Notability?[edit]

Are the blessings themselves all that notable? The church, fine. But the blessings? Enough to warrant an article? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 19:23, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The ceremonies have often been mentioned in the press, most often as "mass weddings." I wrote the article to give a little more information to people who are interested in finding out more about the topic. Steve Dufour 04:39, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, they are often the focus of the controversy regarding this church, and (as stated above) gain a lot of attention by being described as "mass weddings". Ttrygve 17:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's not exactly wrong to say they are mass weddings; although, as the article mentions, some couples were married before the ceremony and others have a legal wedding ceremony after. Steve Dufour 13:44, 2 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This topic is easily sufficiently notable not only because of its being reported in the press hundreds or thousands of times throughout the world as the defining characterization of the church, but also because it actually is so very central to the Unification Church. Things as important and central to church beliefs, polity, and activities as the Divine Principle, True Family, and the Blessing Ceremony certainly need to have their own articles, as they fill out the explanation of what the church is. Some of the articles on peripheral Unification theological topics (such as Object consciousness) or relatively minor events (Seoul Peace Declaration), on the other hand, may not meet the burden of notability. -Exucmember 03:17, 3 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Legal aspects[edit]

We need to clarify the distinction between the religious and legal aspects of "the Blessing". For almost all new couples, the Blessing Ceremony precedes their civil marriage. That is a sharp contrast with most American marriages, wherein the couple are "pronounced man and wife" by a clergyman who is also an agent of the state. That is, the clergyman performs the wedding ceremony and also signs their marriage license. --Uncle Ed (talk) 18:00, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I will see what I can do about that. One thing, as I mentioned before, is that a Blessing ceremony can be a legal wedding ceremony. Steve Dufour (talk) 21:16, 29 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Criticism section[edit]

I originally wrote this section based on criticisms I had run into in the interest of fairness and balance in the article. It really should be rewritten based on published sources. I will work on this when I get around to it. Steve Dufour (talk) 06:40, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Pat Hickey[edit]

The reason I mentioned his autobiography is that he tells a lot about his experiences. The book would be a valuable resource to people interested in learning more about the Blessing and about Unification Church life in the 1970s and 1980s. Steve Dufour (talk) 11:16, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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