Why Must We Break Free from Superstition? On Religions That Spread It

Does Superstition End as a Matter of Personal Preference?

Why must we break free from superstition? I want to begin with that question. Some people ask what the problem is if their religion or belief is a private freedom. One possible answer is that superstition prevents thought. The reason I emphasize here, however, is more direct: superstition causes real harm to oneself or to others.

Once that premise is accepted, the conclusion is clear. A person who spreads superstition enables harm even if he does not immediately take anyone’s money. Suppose someone claims to have seen Amitabha, teaches that Amitabha truly exists and that people can reach the Western Pure Land merely by chanting his name. If a listener hardens that belief and later becomes prey to another fraud in a society overrun with superstition, can the first person who spread it really claim no responsibility?

Yoon Suk Yeol and Kim Keon Hee deserve criticism for their immersion in shamanistic beliefs, but they also show what happens when superstition captures people. Myung Tae-kyun’s claims that one must not enter the Blue House belong to the same pattern. He cannot escape responsibility by saying he harmed no one directly. Spreading superstition made later harm possible.

Spreading superstition is evil in itself. Even without taking money directly, it lays the ground on which other people are harmed.

What Happens When People Say the Nonexistent Exists

To see this problem in an actual case, I watched an MBC PD Notebook report about the Unification Church and Cheon Won Palace. The program shows claims that spirits cling to a person’s body and that money must be paid for rituals to remove them. Structurally, this is identical to saying that an evil spirit is attached and a talisman must be bought. Why do people believe in souls they cannot see? Religious figures, shamans, Buddhists, and countless celebrities have spread such ideas for years, while very few people have stated plainly that they are superstition.

I will draw the line without watching religious sensibilities. There are no souls, ghosts, afterlife, reincarnation, or former lives. There are no gods, supernatural powers, chakras, qi, or dantian. Prophecy, fortune-telling, and divination are frauds and lies. Religion cannot justify claiming to have seen what one has never seen or teaching that something exists without proving it.

In footage of a Unification Church prayer meeting, people strike their heads hard. They are told that ancestors, evil spirits, and all sorts of bad souls have attached themselves to their bodies and must be beaten off. Unless someone identifies that claim as superstition, an entire group can enter such a spectacle. Even children pray late into the night to protect leader Han Hak-ja. This has already captured other people’s lives and children’s lives; it cannot be dismissed as a harmless private taste.

The Birth Myth of the Only Begotten Son and Daughter

The footage shows Moon Sun-myung and Han Hak-ja. Moon called himself the only begotten son, and Han calls herself the only begotten daughter. Such stories recur in myths around the world: a person is born without parents, descends from heaven, or emerges from an egg.

Christian belief that Jesus was an only begotten son born without a human father has the same structure. The mother conceives without a man and gives birth to a child who is therefore called a child of heaven or of God. I call this superstition. Because Christianity normalized this superstition from its beginning, the Unification Church could borrow its form and claim an only begotten daughter. Han Hak-ja had parents like everyone else. Human beings do not reproduce asexually or split apart like worms.

If established religions cannot call their own birth myths superstition, they cannot properly criticize a cult that copies the same structure.

Endless Exploitation in the Name of Ancestor Liberation

The testimony of a second-generation member, born into the Unification Church, shows the harm produced by this belief. Her family was poor enough to receive public assistance and could barely afford underwear, yet her mother kept paying for ceremonies said to release ancestral resentment. The phrase “ancestor liberation blessing ceremony” bundles several assertions into one product: ancestral souls exist, they carry resentment, and a paid ritual can release them and send them to heaven. Afterlife, souls, hell, heaven, and resentful ancestral spirits are packaged and sold together.

Early ceremonies cost 700,000 won, and further payments are demanded for more distant generations. Completing the liberation of 430 generations on both parental sides would require hundreds of millions of won. The victim remembers withdrawing 700,000 won, painstakingly saved when her family was on public assistance, in 50,000-won notes and submitting the payment herself. Making people who can barely survive pay money to rescue invisible ancestors is a hell created here in reality.

When asked why the Unification Church is a cult, many people avoid a precise answer. The answer is simple: it says that nonexistent things exist and exploits people through those false beliefs. Yet Christianity and Buddhism also believe in and spread souls and an afterlife, so they cannot confront the Unification Church’s superstition directly. In the name of religious freedom, society effectively grants freedom to superstition and room for exploitation.

The claim that a ritual sends ancestors from hell to heaven is not comfort for the dead. It is a mechanism that pushes poor living people into a real hell.

Why Do Fraudsters Decorate Themselves So Lavishly?

A recurring trait appears among people who sell superstition. They decorate their exterior to look splendid, solemn, and impressive. In Christian language, they make an outward show. Buddhism, too, builds enormous temples, covers them in gold, and erects gigantic statues. The Unification Church built Cheon Won Palace and manufactures the leader’s authority with crowns, lavish clothing, and ornament. I do not see this as mere aesthetic preference. It is a technique for selling the impression that someone is extraordinary and sacred.

The report estimates about 20,000 registered members in Korea and far more in Japan. According to a report by lawyers representing Japanese victims, roughly 7.2 trillion won in donations was sent to Unification Church-related foundations in Korea between 1999 and 2011. The doctrine of the “restoration of all things” teaches that nations, religions, property, and everything else must return to the church. It claims that even fallen money becomes proper only after it is restored to the church, thereby justifying donations, and extends the same claim to the state.

That money becomes visible in colossal structures such as Cheon Won Palace. According to accounting documents obtained by the program, the total project budget was estimated at about 920 billion won, with approximately 710 billion won spent by 2023, including about 113.1 billion won budgeted for an exhibition of the leader’s life. Members struggling to live are nevertheless sent special donation requests with specified amounts such as 130,000 won or more than one million won per family. The resulting gold surfaces, huge gates, and ornate facilities advertise the leader’s religious authority.

Colossal buildings and lavish decoration are not evidence of truth. They may be propaganda devices that decorate a leader’s authority with money collected from followers.

A Four-Million-Won Hyojeongwon and Spirits Attached to the Body

The exploitation does not end with one donation. One victim bought a small house-shaped object called a Hyojeongwon for four million won because it was said to soothe ancestral spirits. She thought that would be the end, but was soon told that multiple spirits were attached to her spine, arms, legs, and head. More money was required to remove each spirit, and then she was told the removed spirits had to be married. She despaired upon realizing that it would never end and that they cared only about money.

This second-generation member said she feared she might not be happy outside the church. She knew little of the outside world, and her parents, friends, and surrounding community had devoted their lives to the church. Intellectually she thought it was probably false, but emotionally she wished it were all true, because otherwise the lives of her mother, aunts, and friends would all be negated. That broke my heart. For someone who has surrendered money, relationships, and a whole life, acknowledging the fraud means watching an entire world collapse.

Religion cannot be used as a reason to leave this alone. If the church claims to inspect seven generations of ancestors and match compatible couples but actually assigns partners arbitrarily, that is a lie. Who can see and know the condition of seven ancestral generations? Neither Han Hak-ja nor the dead Moon Sun-myung can know it. Tying invisible ancestors to fortune and compatibility in order to determine marriages is another form of superstition and control.

Who Prepared the Soil in Which Cults Grow?

The Unification Church alone is suffocating enough, but we must ask why cults such as the Unification Church, JMS, and Shincheonji became possible. They are possible because society is saturated with superstition. Religion, folk belief, and shamanism have spread it for a long time. In an intellectual society of the twenty-first century, religion bears particular responsibility.

Christianity’s only begotten son, resurrection of Jesus, God, prophecy, apocalypse, souls, miracles, divine punishment and blessing, heaven and hell must all be called superstition. The same applies to Buddhism’s former lives, Amitabha, heavens and hells, reincarnation and karma, supernatural powers, afterlife, souls, and Avalokiteshvara. Yet because Christianity sells superstition and Buddhism sells it as well, prominent channels and intellectuals remain silent out of fear of religious backlash and lost subscribers. They censor themselves and avoid the issue.

Cults grow inside that silence. Once established religion normalizes superstition as respectable belief, a cult can slightly alter the materials and promise to remove spirits, liberate ancestors, or let an only begotten daughter save the world. Condemning only the Unification Church’s victims and practices while staying silent about the superstition of mainstream religion never reaches the root.

Cults do not arise in a vacuum. They grow in a society where mainstream religion has normalized superstition under the name of faith.

The Contradiction in Claiming to Have “Directly Seen” Past Lives

I applied the same criticism to psychiatrist Jeon Hyun-soo’s Buddhist claim that he directly saw former lives. He says that in past lives he was a soldier, a dog, and a heavenly being, and that he directly saw six such lives. Saying he was a heavenly being encourages listeners to believe that heavenly beings and an afterlife really exist. When a prominent Buddhist outlet airs this uncritically, superstition acquires the authority of an expert.

But can anyone directly see the past? To “see” is a present act in which the eye receives visible light. We see what is before us now. We cannot see a past scene. We can recall an image or dream, but that is not seeing. If one closes one’s eyes and imagines an autumn landscape, it has been evoked in the mind, not seen with the eyes. A dream image is likewise something dreamed, not reality directly observed.

There are therefore only two possibilities behind the phrase “six past lives directly seen.” Either dreams, mental images, and memories were mistaken for actual sight, or the person falsely claimed to see what he never saw in order to present himself as a great practitioner. If the claim is meant to decorate a person as someone whose deep samatha lets him see past lives, its structure is no different from the lavish decoration of a fraudster described earlier.

Recalling the past is not seeing the past. The moment a dream or mental image is renamed something “directly seen,” delusion or deception begins.

We Must Call Superstition Superstition Even If We Are Condemned

Let us return to the first question. Why must superstition be criticized as superstition in the twenty-first century? Because hardly anyone says plainly that souls, gods, former lives, afterlife, ghosts, supernatural powers, and relics are superstition. Criticizing Christianity and Buddhism together may provoke followers of both. Even so, what must be said must be said.

Cults such as the Unification Church, Shincheonji, and JMS torment countless people, plunge them into despair, and defraud them. Behind them stand the superstitions continually spread by monks, pastors, Buddhist intellectuals, and religious media: souls, heaven, afterlife, miracles, and Amitabha. No one can say that only his own belief is good while only a cult’s belief is bad. We must break the shared structure of claiming that unseen things exist.

Even if Christians and Buddhists condemn us, we must speak clearly. Believing in an afterlife or soul one has never seen does not make it exist. When someone says spirits cling to bodies, people begin to wonder if it is true only because that assertion has been repeated to them. Once that belief is established, someone else demands money to remove the spirits.

A religion that spreads superstition is harmful to the world. Calling superstition by its name is not an insult to religion; it is an act of protecting people who are suffering now.