What I like most about Buddhism is that it seems kind and it contains much common sense. I catch flies and take them outside. A reverence for life is central to my world philosophy. I’m awed by the spark of life that appears in every creature, people just being one example.
Understand what you mean about added fluff. And I do like going direct to (translated) sources. U of Chicago was big on teaching from original sources. The only texts we had were in math and physics and chemistry, as I remember. Other than that, we had collected papers to study Mendel and such. I still have all my old collections of Greek and Roman philosophers from Western Civ.
And it's job is not to 'add truths' to what you know. It's to 'remove untruths' from what you know. In a way, it posits nothing. The Buddha originally (in legend) didn't want to teach -> he felt no one would get it. But the Gods (allegorical gods!) said to him 'there are a few with little dust on their eyes.' It's a very important statement, because he wasn't referring to an absence of ability to believe, but rather, a presence of a covering over the eyes that prevented people from seeing what is already there. This covering is the ego's clinging to ideas. Jesus saying 'you have to become like a child' is to me no different from this. It doesn't mean become dumb and unwise, it means 'stop believing that your mind tells you the truth.' And frankly THAT ... believing your mind's speech as if it is "I" speaking, or God ... very close to Satan.
I think it can also help with Christianity because ultimately the 'realm of God' is outside the realm of the conceptual, but it's easy to make the mistake to seek God in the conceptual - quoting passages, describing the nature of God, talking theology, arguing over things that happened or didn't. But He doesn't live there, and I think that's why a lot of atheists can never connect.
I once had an argument with an atheist online. He declined to debate whether his "I" had any more substance than the God he denied. Buddha simply refused to answer the question of whether God existed or not. He declared it an invalid question. If you can understand why it's invalid, then I think you can know God. But you can never wrap that up in a concept ... it disappears the instant it appears ... and concepts require time.
A wise man noted that there is only circumstantial evidence for time. Eternity doesn't mean 'long time' it means 'no time whatsoever.'
So there is MUCH to remove conceptually in our minds before we can see God. Most of what we have to remove we'll never know we even have. But studying Zen can help us see 'Oh! I am TOTALLY FULL OF SH*T' about reality, time, subject/object, good/bad. All these things that don't exist 'out there' but that we regularly rely on in evaluating the universe and declaring 'things are this way!' ... and then we have created a world which isn't real but the truth of which we defend to the death, and usually involves suffering and we complain about it ... and all along, our entire lives, Heaven was around and amongst us (or whatever Jesus said - I'm a bad quoter :-))
In the end, the Buddha points out ... Suffering is not only avoidable, it's an illusion built on an illusion. If we cling to our way of seeing things, as if we would die if someone took away our beliefs, then all we do is ensure the perpetuity of that world of suffering. It is not necessary to believe in God to know God. In fact, it can get in the way.
I do that too. My son watched me for years and is able to snatch them out of the air.
He was having a discussion with his friends and did it whilst talking to them and one of them stopped him and said that was Bad Ass!
He goes "What? I do that all the time."