Let's try to summarize the main approaches for religion?

[Sunstone]

Interesting how attitudes vary among cultures. Being indifferent to creation myths and major deities sounds very natural to me, but I often meet people who seem to take it for granted that no one will do that.

Belief is a very tricky subject to ask most Japanese about. In the West and Middle East, what one believes is crucial to so many things. We place a huge emphasis on it. In Japan, belief is much more circumstantial, among other things. Ritual is often more important than belief. So, for instance, a Japanese couple might have their new car ritually purified by a Shinto priest even though they don't for a moment believe in anything supernatural. It is very difficult to summarize the Japanese attitude towards belief. I'm certainly not doing it justice here.

 

[LuisDantas]

There wasn't, as far as I know - I didn't mean to imply there had been. It came up in my response since it's been an interesting and somewhat ongoing conversation he and I have, in which we're both often surprised at the similarities of thought in such divergent cultures.

Just as a clarification, I did not think you were implying that. I thought a casual reader might assume that there was a shared origin and wanted to address the issue preventively.

I agree that it is an interesting observation. Paganism seems to arise fairly spontaneously in many different cultures.

 

[LuisDantas]

Belief is a very tricky subject to ask most Japanese about. In the West and Middle East, what one believes is crucial to so many things. We place a huge emphasis on it. In Japan, belief is much more circumstantial, among other things. Ritual is often more important than belief. So, for instance, a Japanese couple might have their new car ritually purified by a Shinto priest even though they don't for a moment believe in anything supernatural. It is very difficult to summarize the Japanese attitude towards belief. I'm certainly not doing it justice here.

For what it is worth, I find that emphasis on ritual over belief refreshing and more logical than the alternative.

Far as I can figure right now, there is a social bonding role that is often fulfilled by belief in Western groups (not necessarily religious ones) and by ritual in Shinto (and some other Eastern religions, I assume).

I want to say that it is so in part because most Japanese are all too aware of how tricky it is to assume homogeneity of belief even in small groups that make a point to seek it, but I'm shooting blind here and I am probably wrong.

If nothing else, the choice of ritual over belief leads to less ambiguity and less confusion. People's participation in rituals tends to be plain and unquestionable, much unlike their beliefs. Their very presence is evidence enough of their support in shared goals and values, at least to the extent that they spent the time and effort to be there when they could have been somewhere else doing something else.

That, I feel, is reassuring in a way that assumptions of shared belief just can't possibly be. It is not at all unusual to stumble over even finding common usage of the vocabulary to describe beliefs, let alone finding reason to trust actually having common beliefs.

 

[bain-druie]

I have never seen animism and paganism as mutually exclusive. In fact, I'm guilty of taking it for granted that they're often pretty symbiotic [though of course that is not necessarily always so]. Husband isn't familiar with those terms in English, but based on our discussions, he sees Shinto the same way - both animist and pagan.

Japanese culture can be daunting for me, frankly, when it comes to homogeneity; in part because it is still so highly valued. American wives of Japanese who live in Japan have often reported a kind of claustrophobia because of that, and a lack of privacy that is at least partly related. [My husband refuses to countenance the idea of ever living there again because he has a very individualist bent, and from the time he was a small child detested the cultural restrictions.] Yet there is still an implicit understanding of wide internal variance - hence the emphasis on ritual as a group activity, with the implied understanding that each person's belief is their own. SO much their own that it is not polite to speak of it, except to those with whom you're on very intimate terms.

The way my husband puts it is that it's not so much that the kamisama are not as *important* as the smaller kami, but rather that they are *more* important, and therefore less familiar. It would be rude to always bother the creators, to oversimplify. The land spirits and mechanistic spirits are closer, not higher per se.

My druidry is similar, in that I have no real concept of a creatrix/ creator, and no attachment to one - the Tuatha de Danann and the land spirits and so forth are the ones who are close, so they're the ones I interact with if and when I interact on a spiritual level.

 

[LuisDantas]

Japanese culture can be daunting for me, frankly, when it comes to homogeneity; in part because it is still so highly valued. American wives of Japanese who live in Japan have often reported a kind of claustrophobia because of that, and a lack of privacy that is at least partly related. [My husband refuses to countenance the idea of ever living there again because he has a very individualist bent, and from the time he was a small child detested the cultural restrictions.] Yet there is still an implicit understanding of wide internal variance - hence the emphasis on ritual as a group activity, with the implied understanding that each person's belief is their own. SO much their own that it is not polite to speak of it, except to those with whom you're on very intimate terms.

Japanese culture comes across to me as remarkably respectful of individualism and privacy, even as it is also very conscious of how much of a bother those can be.

One of the most interesting aspects of Japanese language that I am aware of is their forms of treatment. As I understand it, people end up giving feedback for the degree of familiarity, affinity and intimacy they feel or want to pursue with each other all the time, often without consciously thinking about it, just because they have to use some form of treatment or another in all but the most blatantly informal conversations.

That, I feel, is a most fortunate feature of the Nihongo, in that it leads to reliable understandings of the degree and nature of mutual understandings among most people.

The way my husband puts it is that it's not so much that the kamisama are not as *important* as the smaller kami, but rather that they are *more* important, and therefore less familiar. It would be rude to always bother the creators, to oversimplify. The land spirits and mechanistic spirits are closer, not higher per se.

I see. There is acknowledgement of a hierarchy of sorts and a commitment to those who take the time to listen to you, so to speak. I hope it is coming across as I mean it.

My druidry is similar, in that I have no real concept of a creatrix/ creator, and no attachment to one - the Tuatha de Danann and the land spirits and so forth are the ones who are close, so they're the ones I interact with if and when I interact on a spiritual level.

That sounds pragmatical and reasonable to me, as well as refreshing. It is slightly odd and a bit disturbing to see people so often obsessed with the Creator of Existence in some faiths. Sometimes it comes across as at least a bit of unhealthy avoidance of more significant (albeit "less cosmic") issues.

 

[GoodbyeDave]

Well, generally speaking, religious scholars classify it as a form of animism. At least in so far as I know from my days studying Japanese culture, religions, and society at university. But that was 35 years ago, so I may have forgotten a lot by now.

I do recall that my second wife, who was Japanese and practiced Shinto, was indifferent to the creation myths and the major deities. She was much more attuned to the kami in everyday objects -- cars, computers, carpets, doors, etc.

The term animism is generally out of favour in the phenomenology of religion: it was one of those dismissive terms cooked up in the 19th century to distinguish "Abrahamics" from "primitives".

Most pagans are concerned with what one might consider deities of the second rank. It's a matter of delegation. If I'm unhappy about my rubbish collection, I contact the borough council, not the Cabinet Office. Asklepios and Agathe Tyche may not have created the world, but they are the gods I call on or thank for health and prosperity.

 

[Tiapan]

While almost all people will at some time ponder the big questions most are happy to leave it in the too hard basket labeled "God did It" and get on with day to day family survival and work.Very few go on to make it a life long pursuit.

I think of populations of humans as consisting of 90% "Sheep" and 10% "Wolves" For the sheep your points 2 and 3 are their only concern,
They are too concerned with daily work and family and only use god/s as and excuse to explain concepts they them selves are ignorant about.
"Why are flowers red dad?"
"Because God made them red, son"
- the easy way out, rather than the truth that anthrocyanin pigment in the petals absorb blue light and reflect red light thus attracting insects who see in the UV spectrum to pollinate the seeds for the next plant generation. Dad could then continue to tell his son about carotene that colors many vegetables and is an essential vitamin for our existence , and then on through the physics of light etc. If he hasn't bored his poor inquisitive son to sleep.

But the "Wolves" that other 10% use the concept to control the society modifying to suit the social structure, In early evolving social systems, the smarter wolves tried various methods of controlling the sheep. After many failed experiments it was found that the system that worked best was when power was differed to an intangible higher virtual power "A god or Gods" ie "Don't blame me! God did it, it was his will your daughter died",
or "I have had a vision through "god" and he has told me we must attack and kill all the evil guys in the next village and save all their women".
"I am king ordained by god! Do you defy Gods word." instead of "why don't you like my policies"

One must admit it has been very successful for several thousand years, However because there is no true religion, as there is often intractable conflict where different versions meet, if they were true they would have converged to a standard compatible form and this has not happened even after several thousand years of intellectual scholarly research. So may be its time to drop the shackles of tradition and develop something relevant to the present rather than redoing stuff that was really only relevant millenia ago, cute it got some of the basics right but we really have moved on since then., eg get rid of Commandments 1-4 keep 5-10 and add the "do unto others as ..." one. Bowing to mecca 5 times a day and those damn mandatory Friday night Rabbi prayer sessions during busy friday night shopping hours seems a rather inconvenient time waster as far as business is concerned. I have my pay docked if I go out for a smoke.

If you continually look for something that does not exist will you ever find it?
Remember we are on a long journey, presently only part way to somewhere in time.
We are not the finished product, what will we know and what will we look like in another million years.

 

[Sunstone]

Some of the oldest Sumerian writings from near the dawn of civilization are writings that seek to establish the authority of rulers as derived from deity. That scam is as old as civilization itself.