sobriety | Daily Inspiration

Sobriety and Temperance

Teachings of Rev. Sun Myung Moon

You know in your conscience that drinking, dissipation and gambling are wrong. That is also why society restricts these activities. They are what ruin the basis of life. Transgressions of love ruin the family, and gambling ruins the society. (320:135, April 1, 2000)

Satan deploys his weapons. First, he deploys his air weapon—tobacco. Next he deploys his liquid weapon—alcohol, and finally his solid weapon—drugs. With these weapons he rots people’s spirits, rots their bodies, and through the nostrils he rots the lungs. Therefore, we do not drink alcohol. We do not smoke. We do not take drugs. These three are Satan’s weapons to destroy humanity. They are fearsome weapons because they block the spirit from communicating with the divine Being. (126:71, April 10, 1983)

Tobacco is a weapon of temptation. When a woman asks a man for a cigarette, casual sex is the usual outcome. In the Orient the men smoke, but it is regarded as disreputable for a woman to smoke. A woman asking a man for a cigarette is inviting him, “Let’s have sex!” The cigarette is the bait. A man inviting a woman to share a drink together is another way of asking for sex. It is the same with sharing drugs. Once they are intoxicated, the man does as he pleases with her, and she does whatever she wants with him. What do they do? They engage in free sex. (287:118-19, September 19, 1997)

A man may be a husband and a father with many responsibilities at home, yet he continually neglects his wife and children and goes off to the local bar, seeking only his own pleasure. Is that person more susceptible to Satan or to God?

While he is drinking, he may be very happy. He might even jump up on top of the bar and dance to express his joy. However, such joy can never last. It has no element of the future, of eternity. His happy moment of drunkenness passes, and before long his family and his world lie in ruins. (124:244, February 20, 1983)

In the Orient we have a saying, Ju-saek-jab-ki: “Liquor, women and gambling lead to mischief.” Liquor, women and gambling are the causes of all the world’s crimes. Is there a major criminal case where alcohol, drugs, women or gambling are not involved?

Drugs are simply a stronger form of liquor. In a drug-induced intoxication you have no control over anything, including your behavior with women. Drinking and drugs destroy any wholesome relationships between men and women. And at the gambling casino thousands of years of achievement can wash away overnight. (230:115-16, April 26, 1992)

When Chinese people gamble, they sometimes bet everything. If a man runs out of money, he may bet his house and even his wife. He may lose his wife! If a master gambles with his servant and loses to him, the master has no choice but to pay off the money he bet—even all his property. What does he do next? He quietly drinks poison and dies. Then his servant can claim his house, his wife, and all that he had. Gambling is that formidable. (124:157-58, February 6, 1983)

Do you have true love in your home? I do not sense much confidence in your answer. You say yes, but you have yellow tobacco stains on your fingers and the smell of alcohol on your breath. If you had true love, your body would be fragrant. (215:244, February 20, 1991)

In today’s families, husbands and wives are quarreling, parents are quarreling, children are quarreling—all are at odds with each other. This inevitably leads to a world where people find joy only in free sex; all their higher emotions are impoverished. To rekindle their emotions, people resort to hallucinogens and heroin. First they stimulate themselves with marijuana, and to continue the stimulation they graduate to opium and narcotics. (243:251, January 17, 1993)

Love’s intense power activates all the cells, stimulating them all with one vibration. At the moment when mind and body, man and woman, are completely engaged in giving and receiving… the power of love explodes one hundred percent. Love’s intense electricity is so intoxicating; that is why love is good. It is far more stimulating than the artificial intoxication that comes from drinking alcohol or taking opium. (117:76, February 1, 1982)

Whether in America, England, Japan, Germany, or anywhere in developed world, people lack any direction in life; they don’t know which way to go. Having lost vertical true love, people desperately seek love on this horizontal plane. Unable to find it, they end up resorting to free sex. Every human being has an antenna that picks up love’s emotion. It could link them with the high-dimensional universe of true love, but that world has vanished. Therefore, to supplement the paltry stimulation of fallen love, people take drugs and engage in free sex.

However, drugs and free sex are no substitute for true love. The more people pursue them, the farther away they are from love. Accordingly, they find that having free sex is not satisfying. Then they turn to drugs, yearning to feel that moment of love’s rapture. Through drug-induced hallucinations they can feel imaginary love, but the feeling lasts only until the drug wears off.

The stimulating effect of the strongest drug cannot be compared to true love. Even drugs lean on true love, we can see that. Love creates an electrical vibration between heaven and earth. The touch of love’s vibration rings out through the universe as if through the speaker of a giant radio. [Connecting to the drug world is like turning on a broken radio and hearing a faint noise, but with true love we tune in to the clear signal.] When the true love loudspeaker booms, “Wah-ah,” the whole world gets excited. Everybody in the universe stands up and dances to its music. You may think the Twist is an exciting dance, but in the true love dance you even fly! (247:126-27, May 1, 1993)

Cheon Seong Gyeong 2220

You will enter God’s original kingdom if you absolutely go the way of loyalty and filial piety, but you will double-back one hundred eighty degrees and then drop straight into hell if you oppose it.
Everyone must realize that free sex is Satan’s domain of love filled with ensnaring evil spirits to bring about the downfall of humankind and expand hell on earth. From the viewpoint of the God of absolute love, the grandmother and grandfather are one; they cannot be separated. They must absolutely become one centering on God, and centering on love. What is love? It is fitting convex and concave together absolutely; mother and father, husband and wife, son and daughter – all must unite in this way absolutely. This is what God wants. (280-135, 1996.11.24)

Cheon Seong Gyeong 1972

The earth that we live on is divided into land and sea. Geographically speaking, peninsulas are situated between these two, in a midway position connecting the continents with the sea. Since early times, peninsulas have always been significant in the formation of civilizations. Greece and Rome, where ancient civilizations flourished, were also located on peninsulas. The civilizations of Spain and Portugal developed on the Iberian Peninsula. However, today these civilizations must expand to the world and bring forth a new civilization in the east and west. The Korean peninsula in Asia is the place for this civilization to emerge. (115-171, 1981.11.10)

Sobriety and Temperance

Liquor, drugs and gambling may seem like pleasant diversions, yet they are the cause of countless people’s downfall. They render a man’s spirit blind to the light of truth and deaf to the promptings of conscience. They lead to addictions that destroy the body, anti-social behavior that breaks up families and damages careers, and even criminal acts. It is well known that many people use alcohol and drugs for their effect of reducing inhibitions as a prelude to casual sex. Even cigarettes can have this effect, as well as influence young people to try harder drugs. Despite some contemporary medical models of addiction that regard it as a disease, the world’s religions affirm that people are responsible to live soberly and steer clear of alcohol, drugs and gambling.
Father Moon recognizes that people often turn to cigarettes, drugs and alcohol because they are dissatisfied with life and cannot find the love they crave. Yet they are poor substitutes. The solution to drinking and drugs is true love. Temporary drug-induced intoxication pales in comparison to the deep emotional satisfaction of true, godly love.

You who believe! Intoxicants and gambling… are an abomination—of Satan’s handiwork: eschew such that you may prosper. Satan’s plan is to stir up enmity and hatred among you by means of liquor and gambling, and to hinder you from the remembrance of God and from prayer. Will you not then abstain?

Qur’an 5.90-91

Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit.

Ephesians 5.18

To the addict, nothing is like his dope;
to the fish, nothing is like water:
But those immersed in the love of God feel love for all things.
Adi Granth, Wadhans, M.1, p. 557 (Sikhism)

Let the time that is past suffice for doing what the Gentiles like to do, living in licentiousness, passions, drunkenness, revels, carousing, and lawless idolatry. They are surprised that you do not now join them in the same wild profligacy, and they abuse you; but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.

1 Peter 4.3-5

Men who are grave and wise,
Though they drink, are mild and masters of themselves;
But those who are benighted and ignorant
Are devoted to drink, and more so daily.
Be careful, each of you, of your deportment—
What heaven confers, when once lost, is not regained.
Book of Songs, Ode 196 (Confucianism)

Woe to those who rise early in the morning,
that they may run after strong drink,
who tarry late into the evening
till wine inflames them!
They have lyre and harp,
timbrel and flute and wine at their feasts,
but they do not regard the deeds of the Lord ,
or see the work of his hands.
Isaiah 5.11-12

What are the six channels for dissipating wealth? Taking intoxicants; loitering in the streets at unseemly hours; constantly visiting shows and fairs; addiction to gambling; association with evil companions; the habit of idleness…

Gambling and women, drink and dance and song,
Sleeping by day and prowling around by night,
Friendship with wicked men, hardness of heart,
These six causes bring ruin to a man.
Gambling and drinking, chasing after those Women as dear as life to other men,
Following the fools, not the enlightened ones,
He wanes as the darker half of the moon.
The drunkard always poor and destitute;
Even while drinking, thirsty; haunting bars;
Sinks into debt as into water stone,
Soon robs his family of their good name.
One who habitually sleeps by day
And looks upon the night as time to rise
Licentious and a drunkard all the time,
He does not merit the rank of householder.
Digha Nikaya 3.182-85, Sigalovada Sutta (Buddhism)

Who has woe? Who has sorrow?
Who has strife? Who has complaining?
Who has wounds without cause?
Who has redness of eyes?
Those who tarry long after wine,
those who go to try mixed wine.
Do not look at wine when it is red,
when it sparkles in the cup
and goes down smoothly.
At the last it bites like a serpent,
and stings like an adder.
Your eyes will see strange things,
and your mind utter perverse things.

You will be one who lies down in the midst of the [rolling] sea,
like one who totters to and fro like the top of a mast.
“They struck me,” you will say, “but I was not hurt;
they beat me, but I did not feel it.
When shall I awake?
I will seek another drink.”
Proverbs 23.29-35

Rabbi Isaac said, quoting Proverbs 23.31, “Wine makes the faces of the wicked red in this world, but pale in the world to come.” Rabbi Me’ir said, “The tree of which Adam ate was a vine, for it is wine that brings lamentation to man.”

Talmud, Sanhedrin 70ab (Judaism)

The Gambler:
These nuts that once tossed on tall trees in the wind
but now smartly roll over the board, how I love them!
As alluring as a draught of Soma on the mountain,
the lively dice have captured my heart.
My faithful wife never quarreled with me or got angry; to me and my companions
she was always kind, yet I’ve driven her away for the sake of the ill-fated throw of a die.

Chorus:
His wife’s mother loathes him, his wife rejects him;
he implores people’s aid but nowhere finds pity.
A luckless gambler is no more good than an aged hack to be sold on the market.
Other men make free with the wife of a man whose money and goods the eager dice have stolen.
His father and mother and brothers all say,
“He is nothing to us. Bind him, put him in jail!”

The Gambler:
I make a resolve that I will not go gaming.
So my friends depart and leave me behind.
But as soon as the brown nuts are rattled and thrown,
to meet them I run, like an amorous girl.

Chorus:
To the meeting place the gambler hastens.
“Shall I win?” he asks himself, hoping and
trembling.
But the throws of the dice ruin his hopes,
giving the highest scores to his opponent.

Dice, believe me, are barbed: they prick and they trip,
they hurt and torment and cause grievous harm.
To the gambler they are like children’s gifts, sweet as honey,
but they turn on the winner in rage and destroy him…

Abandoned, the wife of the gambler grieves.
Grieved too, is his mother as he wanders to nowhere.
Afraid and in debt, ever greedy for money,
he steals in the night to the home of another.

He is seized by remorse when he sees his wife’s lot,
beside that of another with well-ordered home.
In the morning, however, he yokes the brown steeds
and at the evening falls stupid before the cold embers.
Rig Veda 10.34 (Hinduism)

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