On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 22:45:07 +0900, Eric Takabayashi
<etakajp@yahoo.co.jp> wrote:

>Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson wrote:
>
>> >What is the significance of belonging to a "congregation" to Japanese
>> >religion when they don't need to?
>>
>> No one needs to join any religious group, so I don't understand why
>> you are asking this.
>
>Why do you feel it necessary to point out that self declared members of
>Christian "congregations" outnumber members of Shinto "congregations" three to
>one? 

Because I thought it was an interesting statistc.

>It does not mean for example, that there are more Christians than
>Shintoists.

Of course, Q7 bears that out.

>> I notice earlier in the thread you stated: "Most people have never
>> even heard of these stories despite considering themselves Shinto.",
>> which implies that most people consider them Shinto. However, Q7 and
>> the SQ suggests only 22% of 29% of the population consider themselves
>> Shinto.
>
>Did I talk to any of them?

Ahh, so we are discussing your friends, with no extrapolation to the
wider population. That makes the whole discussion rather pointless.

>> And since you spent time trying to define an atheist,
>
>It is not I telling people to get out more to find out what atheism really is,
>whom I was responding to.

I can't really parse that sentence.

>> given the
>> figures in the link I posted, what percentage of the respondants would
>> you judge to be atheist, and what percentage might be deemed as proper
>> believes, not just the once-per-year Hatsumode-ers.
>
>I posted the definition of atheist, and there is onelook.com if you'd like to
>see the collection. I do not care if Japanese are atheist. The only reason I
>bring up atheism is because Japanese people claim to be something else, while
>perhaps explicitly claiming to believe in nothing.

I understand you don't care one way or the other what people believe
in, but you do seem to care about "how they may call themselves both
Shinto and Buddhist, yet actually being atheist and simply going
through the motions", thus I was interested in finding out how you
judged people you talked to to be atheist, using the above-mentioned
survey as a frame of reference so we could see how your friends'
opinions reflected the wider public's opinions.

Ken