Reap

 Those who sow in tears will reap with songs..

Psalm 126:5

2021 is not the easiest time to be a Christian. Then again, it is harder in North Korea, and has been for a long while.

Agricultural metaphors like the one above may not speak as vividly to suburbanites nowadays, but I think most of us still get the jist. Elsewhere the Bible says we reap what we sow. This is common ground with Buddhists who talk a lot about karma. The difference is of course the time scale & the destination. Buddhists inherited the karmic thing from Hinduism. I would argue that Buddha improved the hand he was dealt, but it was a pretty poor hand to begin with.

My wife comes from the Nichiren side of Buddhism in Japan. I have mixed feelings about the dude. Nichiren was right to see the Buddhism of his day as corrupt. But focusing on chanting rather than acts of compassion seems totally the wrong focus to me.

But things got worse a couple of centuries later. When Christianity first arrived in Japan, the paranoid and quite frankly deeply corrupt authorities felt the need to clamp down. Horrors ensued. Japan trod water for 250 years or so, instead of progressing. By the time of the Meiji era, rapid catch up was needed. Christian tech far exceeded Buddhist progress in science.

Today Japan stands again at a crossroads. Kono seems to think "progress" involves gay marriage legalization. But far from aping the increasingly secular West, the absolute last thing a demographically challenged Japan needs is more men & women avoiding traditional marriage & having children. Remember LDP, you absolutely reap what you sow. You can call me a bigot if you choose to. I'm just talking common sense.