What do the people of the world think and think about the wars involving religion that are still being waged without end?
Tens of thousands of people are still being killed in the Israeli-Palestinian war.
Jesus Christ said it right.
"Thou shalt not kill."
In the West, it has already been broken since the time of the Crusades.
In Japan, when the Buddhist cult grew large, it became armed and started conflicts.
In history, there have been "monk-soldiers," those who devote themselves to Buddhism, a teaching that respects life, but who take up arms and even kill people.
When Jesus and Oshaka-sama were alive, they were preaching wonderful teachings.
However, as they began to form organizations and grow larger, they began to cause various problems.
Once a large cult was established, large temples were built as if to show off its power, and it cost a lot of money to build and maintain them.
It would also have required donations that would have threatened the livelihood of the believers.
A large organization will inevitably have conflicts with other organizations and denominations.
And, guided by their grateful "teachings," they even start wars.
The believers who participate in the war do not doubt their own righteousness.
Therefore, when war breaks out, many people are killed in the name of justice.
No matter how much civilization evolves, the world repeats the same thing.
What is religion for?
But there were some religious people who had a backbone.
It was when Japan was plunging into the Japan-China War.
He was a monk of the Otani sect of Shinshu named Shogen Takenaka, born in Tarui-machi in what is now Gifu Prefecture.
He said, "War is the greatest sin," at a time when even the Order was being discouraged by the current state of the war.
It must have taken a lot of courage for him to make such a statement in a village where peer pressure was high.
He was arrested on the grounds that his statement violated the army's penal code (the crime of coined words).
The arrest was triggered by a report from a fellow monk.
He was later granted a pardon and his sentence was commuted to two months and 20 days in prison, suspended for three years.
It is a pipe dream, but if his courageous little voice had spread throughout Japan, might we have been able to build an anti-war momentum that would have prevented us from plunging into the foolish war in the Pacific, which caused so much suffering and loss of life?
But this much I can say for sure even today.
That even in religious circles, there are very few people who can truly say the right thing, no matter what their circumstances.