That wasn't why I left and I agree that Buddhism does not argue that suffering is bad. After being asked about monks ignoring Precepts like the first one a Zen

That wasn't why I left and I agree that Buddhism does not argue that suffering is bad. After being asked about monks ignoring Precepts like the first one a Zen priest is said to have said to Gary Snyder "A Zen man should be able to eat dog shit and drink kerosene". I remember when I first heard the teaching "one should be as happy to eat dog shit as chocolate cake", part of the 'everything is one reality and there is no differentiation' over-arching theme, I loved it and embraced it. "Simply do not differentiate and you will see that everything is good, just as it is." Eventually though I was stuck by the reasoning in the joke "I used to be a nihilist but then I thought, what's the point?" If Nihilism/Zen were true, it would not be wrong to think more positively and to deny Nihilism. CS Lewis noted that if one denied nihilism and was wrong the only thing that would have happened would be that one would have paid the universe a compliment it did not deserve. Or as Tim Keller puts it "Aim at heaven, get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, get neither." And I realised my Buddhist/Vedanta aunt and uncle were just driving around in their Prius from satsang to satsang hugging and laughing with Hollywood celebrities and the 1% while my Evangelical friends were reading books to children with cancer at Children's Hospital. For a direction, Hume is who persuaded me (like the original article notes, he was not an Anti-Realist) and a nice tool for his writings is the versions found at Early Modern Texts. Another useful direction would be the films of Terrence Malick or the polemics of Martin Luther King Jr. Primarily though I recommend the perspective of Erwin McManus (who you can see speak in Los Angeles, on that video at the end of the essay, or from his podcast) who is pursuing things in the footsteps of mystics like Tozer, Murray, Mueller, Francis, and Jesus. For another thinker who is good at explaining things you should listen to Tim Keller's talks available in the Redeemer app at http://www.redeemer.com/r/get_the_redeemer_app http://www.redeemer.com/r/get_the_redeemer_app -- regardless of what you believe, Keller's frequent and glowingly respectful citations of thinkers like Shakespeare, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Marx and others and his references to all elements of culture, from ancient operas to obscure art films is an amazing breadth that always starts conversations between camps who disagree and leaves any listener, spiritually-inclined or not, with more knowledge than they came in with.