Modern philosophy in its philosophical classes might be, but it's originally meant to be truth seeking. Pragmatic philosophy has simply evolved into math. You have math, you prove the logic.
Everything outside philosophy and science is religion. Not to say it's necessarily wrong. But with religion you start with a dogma. With philosophy you start with none. And you have to prove everything according to the dogma. If the dogma seems incorrect, then the assumptions that lead to this dogma are wrong; so you have sects around which parts of the dogma are most correct, and so on.
Buddhism is, to my understanding, something where the dogma is easily proven or disproven by doing the meditation, but doing that much meditation is not accessible to everyone. And so it lies in the realm of religion where you trust in the monks who have done it and build off that.
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Modern philosophy in its philosophical classes might be, but it's originally meant to be truth seeking. Pragmatic philosophy has simply evolved into math. You have math, you prove the logic.
Everything outside philosophy and science is religion. Not to say it's necessarily wrong. But with religion you start with a dogma. With philosophy you start with none. And you have to prove everything according to the dogma. If the dogma seems incorrect, then the assumptions that lead to this dogma are wrong; so you have sects around which parts of the dogma are most correct, and so on.
Buddhism is, to my understanding, something where the dogma is easily proven or disproven by doing the meditation, but doing that much meditation is not accessible to everyone. And so it lies in the realm of religion where you trust in the monks who have done it and build off that.
This makes sense because it is trivial to empirically measure if a person has achieved the cessation of dukkha and escaped the wheel of rebirth