Help with my Buddhism project?

Good evening.

It was my pleasure to take your survey. I hope my answers are of some assistance. I wish you the best on your project.

One cannot "convert" to Buddhism.

Conversion specifically means deciding to accept and believe the teachings of a religion .. and Buddha instructed his followers to NOT blindly believe.

Buddhism is not a belief system.

It is a series of mental trainings that discipline and calm the mind so that you can clearly observe what's going on inside you. Takes some years to develop enough expertise and skill to get anywhere with it ..but what you start seeing will surprise you. Will change your attitude about how you interact with yourself, and even how you relate with all other living beings.

And THIS is the start of being a Buddhist.

It's not about belief. In fact, the longer you practice Buddhism, the more you come to see that "belief" is just a security blanket and not really where truth will be found. You let go, more and more, of any need to believe.

So there is no such thing as "converting" to Buddhism.

You either do the practices or you don't.

And you learn from them or you don't.

Hinduism is very much into psychonautics.

Buddhism isn't.

“Vipassana meditation teaches us how to scrutinize our own perceptual processes with great precision. We learn to watch the arising of thought and perception with a feeling of serene detachment. We learn to view our own reactions to stimuli with calm and clarity. We begin to see ourselves reacting without getting caught up in the reactions themselves. The obsessive nature of thought slowly dies. We can still get married. We can still step out of path of the truck. But we don’t need to go through hell over either one.

This escape from the obsessive nature of thought produces a whole new view of reality. It is a complete paradigm shift, a total change in the perceptual mechanism. It brings with it the feeling of peace and rightness, a new zest for living, and a sense of completeness to every activity. Because of these advantages, Buddhism views this way of looking at things as a correct view of life and Buddhist texts call it seeing things as they really are.

Vipassana meditation is a set of training procedures which open us gradually to this new view of reality as it truly is. Along with this new view of reality goes a new view of that most central aspect of reality: ‘me’. A close inspection reveals that we have done the same thing to ‘me’ that we have done to all other perceptions. We have taken as flowing vortex of thought, feeling and sensation and we have solidified that into a mental construct. Then we have stuck a label onto it, ‘me’. And forever after we treat it as if it were a static and enduring entity. We view it as a thing separate from all other things. We pinch ourselves off from the rest of that process of eternal change which is the universe. And then we grieve over how lonely we feel. We ignore our inherent connectedness to all other beings and we decide that ‘I’ have to get more for “me”; then we marvel at how greedy and insensitive human beings are. And on it goes. Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the world stems directly from this false sense of ‘me’ as distinct from all else that is out there.

Explode the illusion of that one concept and your whole universe changes. Don’t expect to do this overnight though. You spent your whole life building up that concept, reinforcing it with every thought, word, and deed over all those years. It is not going to evaporate instantly. But it will pass if you give it enough time and enough attention. Vipassana meditation is a process by which it is dissolved. Little by little you chip away at it just by watching it.”

(“Mindfulness in Plain English” by Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahayhera ... Theravadan Buddhism)

for your first question atheism and agnosticism shouldn't be listed as religious options because they aren't religions.