I'm an atheist but I quite like Buddism...

[Angrboda]

Buddhism as just a lifestyle, the eightfold path, compassion, meditation, is all well and good. However, Buddhism is more than that. It is a set of beliefs about the ultimate nature of human reality, and how to behave based on those base realities. The lifestyle can be fine, friendly, and healthy. The religion, that which wants to impose that view of reality on its followers and others, that's something else. If Buddhists had good reasons to believe these things, that would be one thing; then it would be the science of Buddhism. But they really don't, and so it becomes the dogma of Buddhism: "Believe this because I'm telling you to believe it."

Westerners are typically introduced to Buddhism as "just a lifestyle," and it only hardens into dogma as they get deeper into it. And it happens slowly enough that western Buddhists don't see the change, and will deny it. But after a while in Buddhism, even western Buddhists come to an unflappable belief that their Buddhist notions are truth with a capital 'T', and the social and psychological mechanisms necessary to maintain that belief, are, to me, unhealthy, and oppressive to those around them.