I can take a distinctly religious attitude towards this present life, which includes death, by seeking within myself ultimate reality which transcends my present life and death. But also I have the choice to take a pleasure seeking, materialistic attitude towards life which is almost a life without conscience; seeing only value in the outer, showy part of life. I might also think of myself as an aesthete being devoted to art and beauty; not just raw pleasure seeking or worse, becoming a substance abuser. Further, I can take a distinctly ethical attitude towards my life while still enjoying aesthetic values in which the ethical side helps to temper and control pleasure seeking (Freud's "id"). I can have a number of such attitudes dominated, mainly, by religion and ethics or without religion and ethics the latter being, in my book, ignoble (an-aryan).
Looking at the religious attitude, there are many different kinds of religions, not just Judaism, Christianity and Islam who share, supposedly, the same god. India has many different kinds of religions and many different kinds of gods. India is the birthplace of Jainism, Buddhism and Vedanta. Let's not forget the Vedas and the Upaniṣads. We could even say that shamanism is religious including Chinese Daoism. I would argue that even philosophy and science venture into the territory of the religious to the extent they seek ultimate reality. Overall, we need to treat "religion" as a generic term meaning, in general, awareness or realization of what is beyond sense experience which may, or may not have anything to do with god or gods.
Buddhism, without a doubt, falls into the generic meaning of religion. At the same time, Buddhism can be much different than Judaism since the former finds a god, real or otherwise, to be useless and "unjust , who made a world in which to shelter wrong." The idea of religion should be more inclusive even including spirituality.
Affirming that Buddhism is a religion is something many Westerners run away from since they have been taught to reject all religion as being, essentially, mumbo-jumbo when in fact, it is only Judaism and Christianity which they mainly reject. This leads to "secular Buddhism" which is a huge mistake. Buddhism is not in any sense of the word "secular"; those who spend their lives trying to secularize Buddhism—even Zen—are hurting Buddhism and themselves. They are simply followers of the current negative paradigm in biology and neuroscience which is still trying to somehow resurrect the mechanical world of Newton and keep alive the world of Darwin with its ideology of survival of the fittest.
All this works against the bigger picture of religion which then puts Buddhism into the hands of haters of not only religion but of spirituality and shamanism. So of what benefit has Buddhism and Zen Buddhism been for the West? Not much I would argue. Only a small group of people see what the Buddha was aiming at while the rest are so preoccupied with trying to stay afloat in a culture of predatory capitalism they have scarcely anytime to look at Buddhism and Zen in a more profound way except to sit in meditation. The only hope for Buddhism in the West is for it to stop trying to sell itself to people who care very little about religion; who mainly believe that there is no life after death.
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