I fear that turning to Buddhism and related teachings for people who grew up with a Christian cultural background is difficult to impossible.
To understand religion, in my view, it is necessary to engage with one's own as much and to delve as deeply into the study as the Westerner likes to do with other sources. And likes to misunderstand many things. Or rather, the result is a strange turning upside down.
When it is said that the world is an illusion and the mental is a construction, this statement has taken on a life of its own and, as it seems to me, has the opposite effect of what it is supposed to achieve.
As an example, I take the pioneers of the so-called feminist movements a la Simone de Bouvoir, who is said to have said that one is not born a woman, but brought up as a woman. She might as well have said that trousers are not trousers, but are made into them.
While it is true that clinging to a particular identity creates more problems than it solves, the dissolution of any form of identity has led to "anything goes", which basically also implies "nothing goes". Which leads to a general disorientation and arbitrariness, since when "everything changes and is changeable", nothing is at its place any more and can elude initiation at any time.
In Buddhism, for example, marriage is not very much discussed or mentioned as sacramental. But it is the first and most important union in an adults life as man and woman. It's the strongest bond imaginable.
That the popes of earlier times have mentioned to "Go and multiply" were mocked and defaced by those who had fallen away from faith. It's as if the delibaretely have misunderstood this message.
Now, I have nothing against mocking the pope if he himself does not have faith but still keeping his message alive.
Having many children was/is equated with poverty, but not with the family being a state within the state.
Those who today think of themselves as enlightened give the impression that they need to sit in Buddha meditation pose as individuals and become vegan and "not harm a fly", spreading more nonsense than sense (no offence).
But theory cannot do without practice and so the "Sangha" seems forgotten everywhere.
One could call the dance between East and West the eternal see-saw, just as between man and woman there is always strife to keep in balance. Where one never really dominates the other, though practising the art of debate and conflict. In other words, they do not separate, but remain together as independent entities.
Adam and Eve were in my view abused for the "war between the sexes", which is just a myth, if you ask me. There was never a "war" but what there was was connection and friction, which is good. Women were never suppressed by their men. But men became suppressed by their masters who then managed to pull the females into believing that they were eternal victims of their male husbands and friends.
The layman of today tries to become an expert for the reason that he lacks a universal faith. He exchanges the cosmic principle for the human one and gets caught up in lesser ideals than what actually gives him orientation. Thus, the common Christian festivals (prayer, song, get-together) were reduced to lesser mottoes: Independence Day, Unity Day, Mother's Day, Women's Day, Employee of the Month and the like. Until we can no longer increase the absurdity.
The existence of the monk conditions the existence of the non-monk. Even more so, the monk depends on the man, for he was born out of a woman. He can't be monk without a mother. The one who consecrates himself to the divine conditions the family, etc. But where everyone wants to be a monk, no one is. And where all want to be fathers, no one is a monk any more.
Those who have lost faith seek salvation in this world rather than in the hereafter (or, Nirvana, if you will), and so it is ubiquitous that everyone tries to save something, from ladybirds to trees, from worms to pigs. And signals this as "virtue" which I think is the opposite. It's fear based and not faith based.
But well, maybe, in some strange ways, it's meant to be what we observe. Construction alternates with destruction. And the moment that it comes to a halt, all of us will be enlightened and the human form might die.