Ignorance and Atheism

Many religions regard ignorance as the cause of evil in human life. Being ignorant of God and the purpose of life, people’s values become confused, and consequently they act wrongly.

The apostle Paul taught that ignorance of God lay at the root of all forms of license and immorality. In Islam it is called “forgetting God,” causing people to deviate from the path and lose their souls. In Buddhism, this ignorance leads to grasping after self and begets delusion (moha). Many scriptures warn against the illusory goals and vanities that infect worldly life.

In their search for knowledge, people have embraced various philosophies, yet it is clear that none of them have illuminated the truth one hundred percent. Oftentimes, valid insights are mixed with false views, leading to confusion and conflict over values, to skepticism and even atheism.

This too is the result of humanity’s fundamental ignorance, whose source stems from the Human Fall, according to Father Moon. As a prophet of the twentieth century who lived through the struggle with communism, he is particularly concerned about this contemporary form of ignorance.

The concluding passages describe humanity’s spiritual blindness. They describe ignorance as a veil that obscures the faculty of insight. The Buddha used metaphors such as moths drawn to perish in a lamp to represent people’s attraction to the illusory vanities of this world.

In Hinduism and Jainism, this blindness (avidya) is what binds people to the wheel of birth-and-death (samsara), binding them sense pleasures instead of seeking Reality itself.

Plato’s famous Myth of the Cave speaks to this topic. Father Moon likewise describes a pervasive delusion, born of the Human Fall, that leaves human beings blind to spiritual truth and totally unable to know God’s inner heart.