I've said it before, but apparently I can't say it enough… I practice minzoku NEO-shintô. It's a folk-based (minzoku) religion* and it's yet another NEW form of shintô.

* Religion in the sense of a set of practices that are engaged in order to connect oneself to this and others worlds.

In most folk religions it's the local community that validates a member's practices and the member's standing within it, not some external body of "experts".

When new individuals are judged, by older competent members, to be competent in community practices they become members of that community. Detemining competence is more a matter of looking at their actions rather than their words — words can mislead, even when that's not the intent, but it's much harder to mislead with behavior. So they're judged on their practices, not creed, dogma, or belief system.

Mythology is treated as just stories — important, but stories none-the-less — and in oral traditions stories are almost never told the same way twice. Oh, there's a central framework, but the details are altered to fit the audience. Over time old myths are altered to fit new circumstances.

shintô has a very long tradition of encountering new ideas — foreign ideas — and then adopting, adapting and absorbing them; making them into unique local cultural expressions of the original idea. It's not static and unchanging, but instead maintains a dynamic equilibrium between local tradition and innovation.

When local expressions persist over time, these new forms of shintô become tradition. And once that status has been granted, by the local community, it's not up to outsiders to question whether or not it's 'real' shintô.

As far as the local community is concerned, "If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, and tastes like a duck; it's a duck! Now stop spouting damn fool nonsense and pass the duck."