Points of comparison are less informative than fundamental differences.
This is where I, on a purely personal level, must give my own qualified disagreement (by qualified I mean disagree with you partially rather than wholly). I think that both points of comparison and fundamental differences can be mutually and equally informative.
I, of course, see the necessity of understanding our differences and being able to respect the different opinions of others. That is after all what democratic values are supposed to teach you to have, a just regard for the opinions of others that differ from your own. Nevertheless society and people in general also need shared values. In society we agree on a code of human rights that even internationally nations are supposed to aspire too, such as the 1948 Universal Declaration. Within Europe, all states accede to the ECHR.
I see no reason why we cannot do the same within a religious context. Just as no man is an island, neither is any religion.
Therefore Buddhists have read the New Testament and noticed that Jesus taught his disciples too "love their enemies and bless those who curse them", which is something similarly taught five centuries earlier by the Buddha when he said that hatred can only be broken by love in return and that this is an "eternal law".
Should one deny this similarity? Can one not benefit from sharing such a similarity and reflecting on it? Can it tell us nothing? Can we not be mutually enriched by that? Of course the two can then discuss the fundamental differences between Buddhist and Christian cosmology, philosophy etc. however I am sure that they would find both endeavours to be enriching.
A student of the history of religious ideas will have discovered ample evidence of religions influencing each other. Christian and Islamic mysticism are indebted - in terms of the language used to exemplify mystical experience - to Neoplatonic philosophy.
Neoplatonism itself was created as a Greek response to the emergence of Jewish and Christian monotheism and was directly influenced by the Jewish philosopher Philo (who lived long before Neoplatonism's founder Plotinus) and later on by Christian monastics.
Islamic Sufism was also likely indebted to Syrian Christian monasticism and later Byzantine mysticism seems to have inherited psycho-physical techniques from Sufism.
Ideas do not always spring up devoid of prior context as if born out of a vacuum, and if they do, I see no reason why a person from a different religion cannot spontaneously of himself reach the same conclusion, and if so why not recognise and comment upon that similarity?
Ultimately there is only one human race and we all ask similar or the same questions. From that, religions and philosophies spring up trying to provide different answers to those fundamental questions, that in turn stem from fundamental needs or a striving for "meaning" in the human psyche, which in turns is born from our common human nature which we all share. Certain scientists have even pinpointed a so-called "god gene" that predisposes people to be religious and/or spiritual. There was an Oxford University study published a few years ago that argued that human beings are innately spiritual, innately gravitate towards something "else" that is immaterial or transcendent and gives meaning to our temporal lives on this earth. From this basic instincts religion is born.
And so apart from direct influence, because human beings all have the same basic needs and pursuit for self-fulfilment and happiness, different sages have touched upon wisdom and reflections that others too have without any direct interaction of ideas, merely as a result of common, universal insights.
I see nothing wrong with accepting, understanding and appreciating both differences and commonalities between religions.
I do not think that respecting something in another religion that has a firm similarity to a concept in one's own, is in anyway problematic or to be shied way from.
I think that just as certain physical laws of the universe are universally true, such as gravity, there are also universal moral truths accessible to the human conscience, as well as facts about life that are objectively true and can be discerned by a wise, experienced person who has learned to heed the dictates of their own conscience and observed phenomenal reality.
I see no reason why, given that scientists from different cultures can reach the same understanding of an objective fact of the universe, why religious thinkers cannot do the same. Hence why St. Thomas Aquinas highly praised the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and the Muslim philosopher Avicenna. He saw in them men who had discerned similar truths to those he had uncovered.
Just my POV.
What does your above quote have to do with your initial post?
