Shinto Religion Essay

The following that is known as Shinto is considered to be the main ethnic religion of the people of Japan. “Shinto” means “the way of the kami” or way of the gods in Japanese. Shinto is also known as “kami-no-michi” in Romanized Japanese. Originally, it was known and adopted from the term “Shindo”, which has roots from the Chinese term Shendao, which combines two Japanese Kanji (“shin”, meaning “spirit”, and “tō”, meaning “a philosophical study”) to create the word Shinto, which is commonly used today. One of the earliest recorded and stored usages of the term Shindo was found to be from the second half of the 6th Century in Japan. Shinto is factually the largest majority religion in Japan, and is practiced by nearly 80% of the current population.
Christianity is a widespread and worldwide religion with over 2,100,000,000 followers, whereas for the most part, the Shinto religion is strictly adhered to the Japanese population and has about 3,000,000 followers. Christianity is a monotheistic religion that focuses mainly on God, the main figure in Christianity, and Shinto is a polytheistic religion that focuses on multiple kami that all have very important roles in the lore and mythology of the Shinto religion. Christianity has a central religious text that is used as the center point of every follower of the religion, and is seen as a divine and holy text. The Shinto faith doesn’t have a main or even central text, but is supported by texts like The Kojiki, and The Nihongi. Neither Christianity nor the Shinto faith have a central headquarters, however, and Christianity is mostly attributed to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, whereas Shinto doesn’t even have a central figure and can’t be traced back to a certain period of time. Shinto was most likely influenced by the cultures from which the people who came to populate Japan millennia ago brought with them to the islands, and Christianity has influences in Jewish, Greek and Roman cultures and