Stealing from a shrine collection basket

Another report about the usefulness of buying surveillance cameras (once again from NTV’s “Real Time News”):

This time the news is from Kagawa Prefecture, where the chief priest of a shrine installed a security camera after noticing a sudden drop in donations. Sure enough, the camera revealed that a thief was stealing from the shrine’s collection box.

When the chief priest confronted the thief, he discovered it was a man who had twice before been caught stealing from the shrine’s donation box. The man had recently been released from prison and had no home and no job. He had been using stolen money to live while visiting unemployment offices and searching for work. The thief seemed almost relieved to be arrested and on his way back to prison.

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http://japanesesnackreviews.blogspot.com/ Orchid64

Shrines in Japan are essentially businesses. By and large, they don’t do the sort of charitable work that one associates with religious institutions like food drives for poor people or donating money to needy people. The fact that the owner of the shrine didn’t try to assist a homeless, jobless person and just turned him over the police is a good indication of the way in which shrines operate.

That doesn’t make stealing from their donations an okay thing to do, but it does reduce the emotional impact of the crime. It’s not like the thief was taking food from the mouths of orphans. He’s essentially taking income from a businessman who has chosen to profit by the superstitions and perfunctory rituals carried out by others.
http://dreamingartemis.blogspot.com dreamingartemis

hate to tell you this, but all religions seem to have become a for-profit business. Church do not use any of their collections for buying food for the poor and needy and instead relay on further donated stuff such as clothes, food and water to give to the needy rather then using their own funds to buy them new.

Buddhist temple are tragically just as bad where they build lavish temples covered in gold while the rest of the people barely live in stable homes as evident by what I have seen in Malaysia.

I can’t anything about other religions though aside from those 2 as I have worked with them before.

Do you think a church/temple/etc would have acted any different?
Rated-R

The more lavish and grand temples in Japan were predominately built by patrons, not clergy. But they also used to hire thugs to run around and harass people.
http://witzl.blogspot.com/ Mary Witzl

This says more about Japan’s need for a better welfare system than it does about Japanese thieving tendencies. Poor guy. I hope he gets some half-decent food in prison.

Stealing from a shrine collection basket

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