Talking about “Buddhism” is like talking about “Philosophy.”
There are many different philosophical schools within Buddhism, as there are in “Greek” philosophy. Talking, as you do, as if the one is monolithic and the other is filled with large, fine and subtle differences is lazy.
Given the subject matter of the different Buddhist schools of philosophy, there is a very prevalent focus on philosophical argumentation of points of logic and correct reasoning within them all.
For example, a Buddhist might point out that your understanding of enlightenment (which is also not a monolithic doctrine, btw) logically fails because you assume that this life is the first for everyone, thus your comment that you’ll never reach enlightenment in this life. If this life is not the first for some, then they can become enlightened in this very life.
You take one school’s position as the monolithic position of all of Buddhism, and that is rarely the case. In part, this is due to the fact that these different philosophical schools have such coherent systems, that to change one thing, requires the rest of the system to be reexamined and tweaked to recover the system’s coherency.
It does have the benefit of letting you off the hook for studying the different systems to argue your point from an informed perspective. But it’s like saying Plato spoke for all Greek philosophers, who all agreed with him on all points, and because he believed in eternal Heavenly Forms, so did Aristotle. Haven’t you seen that famous painting of Plato and Aristotle walking together, with Plato pointing up to heaven and Aristotle pointing down to Earth. If we treated Greek philosophy as you do Buddhism, you’d have them walking arm-in-arm.
Different schools of Buddhism have different understandings of “rebirth” (reincarnation is a Western idea, but some lazy writers don’t know the difference—I’m not referring to you, that would be repeating myself). You used one school’s doctrines (and favorite texts) to characterize all the schools of Buddhism. That’s boring.
But you are right about Buddhism being a religion for all too many Occidental, but so is modern science. For example, the core doctrine of the modern scientific method—Verificationism—which states that to be true, some hypothesis must be verified to be true, has itself never been verified to be true. It’s just a matter of faith that fails logical analysis, like many closely held doctrines of other religions. Note that the fault is not with the scientific method, it’s with the adherents to the belief that this central tenet is so transparently true that it requires no proof, that fault lies. Much as the low-hanging faults of some adherents to the belief, spoken or not, that Buddhist doctrines need not be verified by them personally, say anything about Buddhism, or the manifold Buddhist doctrines. It says a lot about the character of the individuals.
