Scottish agnostic cleric and writer Richard Holloway writes in A Little History of Religion (2016):

Buddhism is a practice not a creed. It is something to do rather than something to believe. The key to its effectiveness is controlling the restless craving mind through meditation. By sitting still and watching how they breathe, by meditating on a word or a flower, practitioners move through different levels of consciousness to the calm that diminishes desire. Buddha would have agreed with an insight of the seventeenth-century French contemplative Blaise Pascal: “all human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”