Closet Buddhism

I have often felt a strong affinity for Buddha's own writings, if not those of many of his followers. The religiosity of much of modern Buddhism is off-putting, but not terribly so, and the imprint of tribalism on nominal "Buddhist" belief has led to religious wars that differ from the Irish Catholic/Protestant schism only in the cut and color of the participants' wardrobe.

And yet it's hard not to find something attractive in his aphorism on what morals and ethics one should adopt as "true,"

Never be satisfied with hearsay, tradition, legend, scripture, conjecture, rationalization, or the mere words of your teacher. When you know in yourself, "These things are blameless, praiseworthy, skillful, and adopting them leads to welfare and happiness," then you should practice them.

Still, there are a lot of suttas in Buddhism that, quite frankly, strike me as nonsense, and a lot of the Buddhists I know are rather silly folk, having adopted an awful lot of New Age practices that have little in common with Four Ennobling Truths, but the tie-dye is nifty. And meditation never hurt anyone.

( Steven Batchelor's Buddhism Without Belief )

In the end, though, Batchelor hasn't come up with anything new: he's made Buddha's description of the human condition palatable to a secular west and in doing so he's paralleled modern psychotherapy, which also hasn't come up with anything new. And the outcome of his "practice of Buddhism" is still an iffy proposition, to be accepted not after consideration but with blind belief, and if it doesn't work for you it's not because you're wired differently from him, but because you're just not trying.