Click
image to enlarge.Emails from Kirsten and Naoto
January 2005
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:03:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Religious Observances?
Dear Friends and Family:
Well, we are having a very very mild winter here in Tokyo. As we are all off to North America this Friday (naoto to Ottawa for work and me and girls to Wichita to impose on my brother) I think we will probably be in for a cold shock.
We've all been laid low with various degrees of stomach flu over the past week. It is hard to know who to comfort when both of your children are hacking at once...
But enough with the details (smile.)
Religious Observances?
So I was conversing with the cute (in a smurfy kind of a way, not a hunky kind of way) guy who does my hair. (and not to go off on a tangent, but...did I ever mention how emotionally wracking it is to find a hair stylist in Japan?) And we were making polite conversation about the recent Christmas and New Year's Holidays here in Japan.
(I am convinced all the stylists at the salon ha
ve little cheater cards with set questions to ask their customers) And he was saying how he'd been so busy that he hadn't found time to go to "the first shrine visit of the year". This is something a large majority of Japanese people do. Some people stay up past midnight and go to big, famous shrines at 12:01 a.m. for even extra luck. My stylist was saying how he felt uneasy, as if he would have an unlucky year, if he didn't go soon.
Which brings me around to this whole question of religion. Ask most people in Japan what religion they are and they get confused and hem and haw (or the japanese equivalent) and say they aren't really anything.
Yet they all go to Shrines and clap their hands and pray on New Year's. And most funerals are conducted by Buddhist priests. Is this religion? My first inclination is to say no, it isn't. It's cultural. However, at second glance, I think the New Year's thing, (as evidenced by the stylist's uneasiness) goes deeper than just "going through the motions."
On some level there is an emotional reaction. Now wouldn't that be defined as religious? I wonder.
Does it "count" if you don't feel anything? Or, even if you define yourself as something, say Lutheran, and you go to a Lutheran church service and you feel absolutely nothing going through the motions, does that in fact "not count" then?
Now I originally planned to take this thread into a discussion of how I've felt "religious-y" at Shrines (especially those in Kyoto) here in Japan, and how I think God reveals himself in many different ways to different cultures and noone who leads a "godly" life is damned....but....
Instead, let me talk about Evolution and Intelligent Design. Evolution is the theory of how Earth's myriad species came to be that is most widely accepted all over the world by scientists and many lay people.
Intelligent Design seems to be a U.S. grown spin on creationism that claims "...that scientific data show evidence in the living world for "irreducible complexity" or "specified complexity," which can only be explained as the work of an intelligent designer. Whether this cosmic designer corresponds to the biblical God, they admit, is a metaphysical or theological question that defies empirical science. Nevertheless, they argue, the observable evidence for design is scientifically compelling. " (taken from a salon.com article http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2001/02/28/idt/index.html)
Now it seems a school board in Dover, PA wishes to make intelligent design part of the tested and taught curriculum at their schools. Or, as the Salon.com article put it, not the whole board, just 6 out of 9 people on it.
In case you were wondering, I weigh in on the "separation of church and state" is a good thing side.
Yet...if I truly, emotionally, believed that this is the way that the world was made and that my God wanted everyone to believe it (and I am having a hard time getting my head around a God who cares that much about what we humans believe through our science at any given time. I mean, it's an evolving thing (no pun intended) God didn't strike us down because we believed the Sun circled the Earth, right?) maybe I would understand the head space of Dover's board of education.
Religion, I think, is a good thing. However, when it just becomes "going through the motions" for its own sake (either a Lutheran just mouthing liturgy words with no impact, or a Japanese going to a Shrine for no particular reason other than that's what all his friends are doing) then I think religion tends to be easily corruptible.
And I wonder if the Dover, PA board of education is going through the motions of religion as a way to accrete secular power and glory, or if they are really doing it for the glory of god.
I wonder.
love and light,
kirsten
p.s. This picture from New Year's of Mia with her Aunt Michiko is just to settle, once and for all, whose side of the family Mia resembles the most. I rest my case.
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image to enlarge.