No.1 Referenced from ~ Part1 - Chapter 1 - Episode 1

"What does it matter if God exists?"

"What Do People Live By?" - When I was about to graduate from high school, I saw the title on the spine and picked up this folktale collection, but after a few minutes I put it back on the bookshelf.

This was because I realized that the book did not contain what I expected from the title. What I found was not "What should people live by?" but "What do people actually live by?", a typical folktale-like, and yet ordinary, observation.

Around the same time, at the recommendation of a classmate, I borrowed and read the scriptures of a certain Japanese religion. That was my first encounter with a religious book, however, I felt its content was frivolous.

Everywhere I looked in the scriptures, they were filled with logic that the way the world works is like this, so if you do this, this will happen. It was far from something that a young idealist like me could read through, who thought that praying for business prosperity was simply evil.

Since then, I have come to have the following antithesis against religion. "Let's suppose that God exists as you say, but what does it matter if God exists? Is it right to live in such a way that one's way of life changes depending on whether there is a God or not?"