Escape from time

I think Buddhism makes a certain amount of sense in its original setting. It arose in a pre-Christian culture, so the available options were awful. From a pre-Christian standpoint, life is characterized by irredeemable suffering. For some people, it's suffering from the get-go. Others get off to a better start, but incrementally, sometimes dramatically, and inevitably, lose more and more of what little makes life worthwhile. In Buddhism, time is your enemy, so the only solution is a radical solution: to escape time by ceasing to be. 

The outlook of Buddhism reflects existential nihilism. Logically speaking, consistent Buddhists ought to be antinatalists. In practice, that's what celibate Buddhist monks are–although I'm sure that behind-the-scenes, many Buddhist monks are sexually active. 

In a sense, both Buddhism and Christianity are future-oriented, but they have radically different views of the future. Christianity has a more positive view of the present, but acknowledges that for many people, this life is grim. Even in a fallen world, there are many natural goods, but these aren't evenly distributed. 

From a Christian standpoint, time is your friend–at least in reference to the afterlife (assuming you die in the faith). The best is yet to come. In Christianity, you escape suffering, not by oblivion, not by escaping time, but by escaping into a better time. A bit like those time-travel scenarios where the present is hellacious, but with your time-machine you can go backward or forward to a time of your choosing, when things were better (or got better).