| Part 1 The Theory of Faith | Hirohumi Hoshika |
"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. However, as it was my first time encountering a religious book, I felt perplexed by its contents.
It said things like "Angry people get cancer" and "Disease is unique to humans and does not exist in the animal kingdom," but what puzzled me wasn't that these views seemed out of line with common sense. What puzzled me was that, even if what was written there was true, the way in which one draws conclusions such as "Therefore, we should not be angry" or "We must abandon karma" based on such "the way the world works" seemed mercenary.
Motivating good deeds with the idea of "heaven" or trying to encourage people to take special actions by announcing the arrival of the "end of the world" is no different from encouraging people to exercise regularly to maintain good health. The difference lies in which areas of the various possible "worlds" we consider to be the reality that actually befalls us. Then, based on that understanding, they explain how to live in order to ultimately benefit, but that was not what I wanted to know.
I don't care about the world advocated by doctrines whose truth or falsity is uncertain - such as "cosmic law", "God", or the "spirit world". I just thought it would be good if I could understand what kind of way this religion teaches as the right way to live.
However, 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?"