> How does zen buddhism rank on the ‘major world religion’ scale? Or (by followers) Taoist/Daoists?
Well if you're just going off "popularity" then yea, you're going to end up with a lot of dogmatic belief that is the result of millennia of use by states. That's a big part of how ideas consistently spread and are maintained over time. That doesn't strike me as very useful and you're likely to offend a lot of people if you treat this understanding as accurate. But the closest parallel in the east—namely, confucianism—is almost entirely secular, which is a strong sign that you're actually talking about the dangers of authority. Arguably belief in "market forces" as a rational form of resource distribution today form another such secular religion worldwide, and indeed when you watch political figures discuss macroeconomic forces the effect is largely similar to the Pontifex Maximus slaughtering a bird and inspecting its liver to understand the future.
> there is one objective view of reality
Yes, this is fundamentally contrary to the Tao (or Dao if you prefer). It's also very rare for most animist beliefs to have anything like this sort of understanding of the sort. I don't know as much about Buddhism or Hinduism, by I understand this is also trivially incompatible with that from my layman's chair.
For the most part humans just need to agree insofar as we have to in order to form a society. It seems like what you're actually complaining about are the effects of Abrahamic religions and their historical relation to state authority, which very much emphasize the importance of believing certain historical events are true. That's actually quite rare by enumeration of what people refer to as "religion", "faith", "spirituality", etc.
Well if you're just going off "popularity" then yea, you're going to end up with a lot of dogmatic belief that is the result of millennia of use by states. That's a big part of how ideas consistently spread and are maintained over time. That doesn't strike me as very useful and you're likely to offend a lot of people if you treat this understanding as accurate. But the closest parallel in the east—namely, confucianism—is almost entirely secular, which is a strong sign that you're actually talking about the dangers of authority. Arguably belief in "market forces" as a rational form of resource distribution today form another such secular religion worldwide, and indeed when you watch political figures discuss macroeconomic forces the effect is largely similar to the Pontifex Maximus slaughtering a bird and inspecting its liver to understand the future.
> there is one objective view of reality
Yes, this is fundamentally contrary to the Tao (or Dao if you prefer). It's also very rare for most animist beliefs to have anything like this sort of understanding of the sort. I don't know as much about Buddhism or Hinduism, by I understand this is also trivially incompatible with that from my layman's chair.
For the most part humans just need to agree insofar as we have to in order to form a society. It seems like what you're actually complaining about are the effects of Abrahamic religions and their historical relation to state authority, which very much emphasize the importance of believing certain historical events are true. That's actually quite rare by enumeration of what people refer to as "religion", "faith", "spirituality", etc.