[debit-freak]

> No major world religion I’m aware of is all that friendly to anyone who disagrees with the answer once ‘given’

Eastern worldviews (tao, buddhism—particularly zen buddhism) are inherently contradictory. Regarding these your perspective is simply nonsensical. Most worldviews have contradictory aspects that require inward judgement rather than just looking to a given bureaucracy to determine value; it's very rare for opinion to have any meaning at all outside of the christianity and islam.

Of course, this comes back to what you consider a "religion". If you're looking for something like the catholic church where belief in a specific worldview is necessary for salvation of the soul it's a pretty natural to be dismissive of anything other than what you already believe in as you presume that other people even care what your opinion is (metaphysics, worldview, belief-system, whatever you want to call it) when likely your opinion is entirely beside the point.

[AlotOfReading]

The very idea that there would a specific set of canonical literature and beliefs that define a religion would have been a radically new idea if we go far enough back. It originated with early Christians and other Jewish groups in the Roman empire and it's not something that many other religious traditions adapted before the modern era.

[lazide]

Would a group be able to call itself Christian, while not believing in a single divine god and that Jesus was his prophet?

Would someone be able to call themselves Jewish, without considering themselves one of ‘god’s chosen people’ who had a covenant with that one god?

Would someone be able to call themselves Hindu without believing in the dharma?

Would someone be able to call themselves Muslim without believing in the one god, with Mohammed as his prophet?

Would someone be able to call themselves Buddhist without believing in Siddhartha Gautama, the dharma, and that enlightenment could exist.

At least, by anyone serious about the meaning of those groups or being at all honest about it. (Plenty of ‘Christmas Mass’ Catholics and non-observant Jews from a community identity perspective, but most would freely admit they aren’t ‘religious’ depending on who is asking).

At literally any point since those religions existed?

That is my point - these groups are fundamentally defined by beliefs, and while they are often pretty flexible on the margins, every one of them has core beliefs that define it and are non-negotiable.

Or do you think a Polytheistic Jew, and/or one with no genetic or conversion history is going to be accepted at Temple, or a Hindu who follows the Bible?

[lazide]

How does zen buddhism rank on the ‘major world religion’ scale? Or (by followers) Taoist/Daoists?

Though in both cases, would the unacceptable idea not be ‘there is one objective view of reality’, and anyone holding such a view highly unlikely to be considered an adherent?

[debit-freak]

> 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.