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Originally Posted by MMM
I think you are getting more philosophical than I am prepared to.
I will say please consider the notion that instead "shyuukyou" not fitting into the definition of religion, it is possible that "religion" doesn't fit into the Japanese notion of shyuukyou.
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Youre absolutely right. That is what I intended to mean. That the concept of shuukyou and religion dont meet. I hope you didnt think that
I thought that the Japanese have a "wrong" definition or conception of the word and that we have the "right" one. (Actually, I think I swing the other way. In my opinion I think the understanding of Shuukyou is more useful and easier to work with over religion)
Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
I am not quite understanding your idea that a Japanese person can compare religious beliefs with political beliefs in a way that we wouldn't do in the West.
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A clue to the answer youre looking for is in the part Ive bolded. A discussion on the assumptions made about human nature (which I would say is what fundamentally seperates political ideologies from each other) is just that. Japanese dont treat the discussion as two different realms.
Lets take the creation of the Earth in the bible and compare it with the creation of the Earth in Nihonshoki. In the bible the Earth was created roughly 6000 years ago by God in 7 days. This is completely at odds with modern science and people that strictly believe it are conveniently labelled fundamentalists. YET there is still a realm for this story to thrive in and have relevance as some sort of metaphor and that is the religious one. Many Christians can reconcile their belief in God creating the Earth as it is told in the bible with modern science because they have the concept of "faith"(religion) and "reason"(science) and they remain seperated.
Now for Nihonshoki. The Universe was born of an egg which created the heavens and the Earth. You'd be hard pressed to find a Japanese person to whom this story is even relevant in a working sense and the reason being that shuukyou was never institutionalised in the Japanese mind as it has been in the Western one. It is simply imagined as I described it above. "The teachings of a group or sect".
Not to say that faith doesnt exist in Japan. I have a friend who has a passive belief that every object has a type of "spirit" or "energy" inside them that must be respected (be it a beautiful tree or flower to the computer keyboard Im typing on).
Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
But bringing that idea of traditional being religious...just because a tradition is based in a religious practice doesn't make the practitioner necessarily "religious". I think what someone considers themselves and who they look to for guidance more accurately defines whether one is religious or not.
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I completely agree. Yet the "debate" as to whether Japan can be considered a religious country was (is still?) contested in the field of Japanology. The argument of the essay I gave in the OP gives says the answer is a definitive no... but rather than give his own definition of religion and justify his position based on that he simply argues that "religion" as it is understood by the people that say it is a religious country, does not exist and that it might even be a flaw in the Western mindset to imagine it apart from other fields of study which address similar things to those that "religion" does. (Assumptions of human nature, interpretation of life and death, the universe etc.)