Page 275 - Islam and Far Eastern Religions

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This was an oppressive regime reminiscent of Pharaoh’s govern-
ment, related in the Qur’an, as divinity was perversely ascribed to the

head of state just as it was in the case of Pharaoh.

THE PERVERSION OF WORSHIP OF THE EMPEROR
State Shintoism was not wholly compatible with the Japanese
Shinto religion until the 19th century. The emperor and his government
created new rules by the day, and the so called sacred scriptures were

written and rewritten by the state administration. Basil Hall
Chamberlain, an expert on Japans at the Tokyo University was drawing
attention to that era’s Japan in his famous book titled The Invention of A
New Religion. 117 He was relating the following in his work on the empire,
those who worked in its service and how they created a new religion:
Mikado-worship and Japan-worship — for that is the new
Japanese religion — is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenom-
enon. Every manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is
made, every present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century
Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-ex-

isting ideas have been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to
new uses, and have found a new centre of gravity. Not only is it new, it
is not yet completed; it is still in process of being consciously or semi-
consciously put together by the official class, in order to serve the inter-
ests of that class, and, incidentally, the interests of the nation at large. 118
As the author states, the new superstitious and perverse religion
of State Shintoism began to be created towards the end of the 19th cen-
tury. As it was not a faith based on Divine revelation, the traditions and

erroneous beliefs by the name of Shintoism could be easily adapted to
the needs of the regime without it being considered “strange” by soci-
ety. Thus, State Shintoism became the means to an end of the ascend-

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)