Claim. God’s love is the love of a vertical Parent and True Parents’ love is the love of horizontal parents; the two function as bone and flesh respectively, and inheriting both requires bearing children — making childlessness a sin.
Elaboration. Moon constructs a vertical/horizontal axis of parental love: God is the vertical Parent (the “bone of love”); True Parents are the horizontal parents (the “flesh” of love) (1.3. God’s love and True Parents’ love). The bone-flesh analogy is principled, not decorative: “Is there flesh without bone? No, because it would have nowhere to attach itself.” The vertical provides structure; the horizontal embodies it.
The inheritance claim follows: minds are the fruit of the vertical tradition of God’s love, while bodies are the fruit of the horizontal tradition of True Parents’ love. To form a “horizontal basis of a family” that also has a “vertical center,” one must be husband or wife and have children — sphericality requires both axes.
From this Moon derives a startling moral claim: “so it is a sin not to bear children. You should not be a childless person.” This is not framed as preference or cultural counsel but as ontological — without children, the four-axis sphere of love cannot form. The claim collides directly with celibate religious traditions (monastic Christianity, Buddhist sangha) and with modern voluntary childlessness; Moon’s framework cannot accommodate either as good. It also collides with reproductive medicine realities — the text doesn’t carve out exceptions for infertility.
Moon further grounds the vertical-horizontal structure in the dual-characteristics theology: God’s masculine and feminine characteristics separate into Adam and Eve, and love is what reunites them — and it is only through this separation-and-reunion that God “can experience how strong the love is that is contained within Himself.” God’s self-knowledge of love is mediated by the partner-structure of creation.
This is core Principle material — the dual-characteristics doctrine (hyung sang in another register) operationalized as a theology of love. Critics typically engage on the sin-of-childlessness claim and the implied gender essentialism. Worth a thread once counter atomics exist.