>>112547
I think we can probably find common ground here. In a sense, I feel like the focus on "beliefs" itself as the focus of religion is kind of a thing that developed with organized religions like Christianity and Buddhism and not necessarily how the most ancient spirituality was practiced. If you look at the way Shintou is practiced now, you can work as a miko even if you don't profess to "believe" in the faith... you just have to do the correct rites, etc. From what I understand, it was very similar in Ancient Greece and Rome. Lots of people would do divining rituals etc. even if they didn't really "believe" in them. The religions were mostly about external rites, holy sites, etc. and the "metaphysics" of the religion wasn't very clearly defined. There was no "holy book" in Ancient Greece, nor is there in Shintou or most of the other similar "pagan" religions, just a lot of folklore stories. The Kojiki could be a contender I suppose, as Shintou priests pretty much always study it, but certainly it doesn't function much like a bible or even like Buddhist sutras.

I think of it like this: what does it "mean" to us when we put flowers on a gravestone? We don't necessarily "believe" that the ghost of the person there will really see the flowers, but it seems wrong to assess the meaning and importance of that action via our "beliefs" in the first place. I think the distinction isn't so much that in ancient times the pagans all "believed" sincerely and we now only view it as some kind of LARPing. It's more that there wasn't as much of a distinction between "worshiping" things and "honoring" them and between beliefs and actions (offering things, prostrating the body in the correct way, making a pilgrimage, etc.). So while we can maybe make distinctions between some "pagans" who saw everything as having an individual nameable spirit (like Japanese) versus there being some kind of "spiritual dark matter" in everything (like Polynesian mana) or some kind of more monotheistic-sounding idea (everything being part of a "Great Mother" etc.), in a sense the religion "functions" more as a matter of external ritual than internal, metaphysical beliefs.

Also I do think that sometimes we falsify the idea of animism, nature worship, etc. by making them all seem like hippies who saw the world as some fairytale wonderland. Nature can be scary and sublime and it makes sense to view it as something overwhelming and even violent. I don't think I ever tried to argue that nature worship entailed only seeing things as peaceful and blissful? But I do think we idolize war less in the modern day than in the ancient world. Shintou has probably become to be peaceful and comfy because modern Japanese people are pacifistic. It was a religion of holy war in World War II and before that endorsed violent suppression of Buddhism in the Edo Period, like you say. But this is to be expected. All religions evolve to some degree, even these most ancient and primordial ones.

You're very knowledgeable and it's interesting to reflect on your thoughts. I find world religions, folklore, and their history to be a very interesting subject.