Empowering the Heavenly Parent Holy Community
... testified about being confined by his parents and relatives, and pressured to renounce his faith by deprogrammers and Christian pastors. He described how he feigned renunciation to escape, but said: “That was the beginning…
... the Family Federation sees the court’s decision as favoring the plaintiffs and ignoring the religious organization’s side of the story. The statement that the provisional seizure is “one-sided” means that the Family Federation believes…
... if the Family Federation, which has committed no criminal acts, is forcibly dissolved, then Christian churches could be next under public scrutiny – and eventually, it could even affect Buddhism and the Soka Gakkai.…
... I think that we, as other religious sects, will eventually be unable to defend ourselves when a dissolution order request is directed at us with unreasonable logic.
... the root of the issue lies in the fact that some Christian pastors have targeted Family Federation believers and subjected them to forcible faith-breaking (de-conversion, renunciation of faith) involving abduction and confinement.
... The Japanese courts cannot be seen as impartial in this case. Due process is a joke when it comes to the Unification Church, which has been presented as a criminal organization in the media…
... The request to participate in the hearings was made by eight individuals, including leader Kojima. They are church staff, working adults, and students who are believers. The group collected over 35,000 signatures opposing the…
... And taking into account all those “victims” who never formulated any claims, the court inferred that “although the damage has been on a downward trend, it is still at a scale that cannot be…
.... Driven by political motives, the then-Prime Minister Kishida gave in to media pressure, proclaimed that past civil disputes could now be considered violations of laws, and filed a request for the dissolution of the…
... Over forty years, around 4,300 members of the Unification Church in Japan were subjected to this violent deprogramming. They were abducted and confined by families, and forced to submit to indoctrination by “deprogrammers,” who…