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Originally Posted by steamboatsam
The overall idea of kami actually. I've read from my world religions book that its a set of gods and spirits that govern over certain things in nature. A site I looked up recently said that kami are not only gods but ancestors who have reached a high spiritual state, and one said that kami is just nature itself? I've read probably six different ideas and interpretations of kami that I just haven't been able to understand it clearly cause I don't know if they are all right, if one or two are right, or if all of them are wrong.
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Kami are anything other than people, really. You can have, for example, the little "kami" of an object, the nature "kami" of a river, and the ancestral one. They`re all right.
If you believe in it, it is there. So if even a single person believes that a "kami" exists in something - it does. But if no one believes in it, it will disappear.
You can track histories of countless local kami back to mundane events - someone did something and connected a later event to it, so a kami is born in that location.
It can be a lot like superstition, but instead of just having a lucky/unlucky object - there is a reason for the luck or lack of it.
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Would you happen to know how shinto is compatible with any religion?
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As Shinto isn`t a strict set of beliefs, it is accepting of pretty much anything. Other gods are just some other powerful kami that are somewhere else. The creation myth is the creation of Japan, not the world - there is no reason to consider any other beliefs "wrong".