Religion or not?

I saw this from a Buddhist apologist. It was interesting. What do you think? Does anyone know anything about all this. OR... is this just a secular region... like we have in the USA?? OR is it part of the gross deception? I really don't know.

""A lot of religious people like to boast that theirs is not a religion, it's a lifestyle. (Don't tell me you haven't heard that.) But in all seriousness, Buddhism is the one with the strongest claim to not being a religion, but a philosophy. There was nothing divine about the Buddha, and you don't actually pray to him (well, the more superstitious Buddhists do, but the more knowledgeable ones know that it doesn't work that way). You don't actually pray to anything. There really isn't anything about Buddhism that demands any great leaps of faith.

...well, except for reincarnation. But that's not actually a Buddhist thing; strictly speaking, it's a Hindu thing. Buddhism simply came about in a socio-cultural environment in which reincarnation was taken for granted as the way the cosmos works."" 

 

It came from this post:

Dalai Lama says we need a 'global system of secular ethics'

io9.com

Back in September the Dalai Lama told his Facebook friends that "grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate," and that