Ben, I so much enjoy exchanging ideas with you that I gladly ignore your pejorative terms (facile arguments...a dodge). Throw those straw men in my path, and they are but chaff!

I'm glad you agree with my main point, in the end, that some 'elite" Buddhists are amazing individuals. As the Brits would say, "The proof is in the pudding." A religion/philophy that produces amazing human beings is on to something. A good practical critique of Buddhism might be that it has not produced more. Meanwhile, a lot of lifetimes might have been put to more productive use.

Sorry, I'm digressing from our dialogue:

My point was not that "the practice" - as a noun" - was different than humanism., But rather that the enlightened ones who practice (as a verb) compassion, do so in a profound way, due to their Buddhist training.

I don't think your analogies to science or therapy captured what I intended to communicate.

But, if I were to use the educational analogy, I might use one of training to be a surgeon. You could say, "this person has spent years of study and practice in order to gain a piece of paper announcing they have a degree, and that degree allows then to make a lot of money just repeating what they were taught in school. How hedonistic of them!

To say such a thing ignores that the training enables them to wield a scalpel with such skill that many lives are saved.

Okay, I hear your voice, as vividly as if we were sharing a drink in a pub! "Bodisattava!" you declaim, smashing your mug on the bar. Well, yes, but the Buddha himself prefigured the Boddissattvas. And, I personally met two Theravada monks who embodied this state of natural love and compassion for all living beings. And one of them was a German who had been in the robes less than five years.

To sum up, it's not about the practice, it's about the path, and the quality of human beings produced when they follow that path.

That can't be accurately described from the outside, or enshrined in a doctrine or dogma.

And so, for me, the project of Buddhism remains fundamentally different than the project of humanism. (If you are interested in my critique of Humanism, you could check out my book, Indestructible You: Building a Self that Can't be Broken. (2015, with Shai Tubali).