Do you think the statement “The enlightened is just the upgraded atheist” is true? Why or why not?

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I hadn’t heard the statement before and Google was no help, so I have pretty much zero context to go on here. The most ambiguous term being used here is “enlightened.” This word can mean pretty much anything, but it’s primarily used in two contexts. In Buddhist soteriology and in the historical European one.

The Age of Enlightenment is a historical period in the 17th and 18th centuries where a flowering of philosophical thought powered by the scientific revolution paved the way for people to start to consider the prospect of remaking the world on a pillar of reason.

The contrast between rationalism and empiricism is key to understanding the epistemic philosophy underpinning the revolution. Empiricism is the value of experience as the source for justification of truth.

Whereas rationalism sought to deny experience as a useful guide for the creation of knowledge, stating that reason alone can bring one to what’s true, reason from first principles such as mathematics or anything seen as absolutely true. Rationalism is thus a methodology for finding truth and thereby knowledge.

In the public sphere this philosophical difference got ignored in favor of simply conflating rationalism with atheism and this is how the movement got its atheistic overtones. The Enlightenment spawned political ideas like that of the social contract, which rested on the foundation of natural rights, rights that were not determined by laws or customs, but rather as universal and inalienable.

Religiously-speaking, there were ‘back-to-scripture’ movements which sought to abandon the dizzying theological edifice and get back to the basics of the New Testament.

Atheism played a far smaller role in Enlightenment discourse than is now assumed. More people were interested in deism rather than atheism, which sought not only to eliminate the theological corpus, but the Bible as well. The idea was that you could use pure reason in order to engage with God and understand the world. John Locke noted that if man did not have religion, then moral anarchy would reign and civilization would collapse. In the 1800s, those weren’t crazy words. Now of course, things are different.

Locke is often credited for inventing the idea of separation of church and state. He thought government had no business directing the conscience. The phrasing didn’t appear until Thomas Jefferson wrote it into the Bill of Rights. It’s primary legal test was of Jehovah’s Witnesses, early Americans often prohibited their evangelism.

So, in short, the characterization of the Age of Enlightenment as an ‘atheist revolution’ is overblown, more the product of bombastic journalism than of philosophers and statesmen. Belief in reason was the ultimate driver of the movement, while faith was ever-present.

Buddhist soteriology is even less affiliated with atheism than is commonly held.

There is no almighty God in Buddhism. There is no one to hand out rewards or punishments on a supposedly Judgement Day. Buddhism is strictly not a religion in the context of being a faith and worship owing allegiance to a supernatural being.

This doesn’t say as much as you might think. Basically this states that Buddhism isn’t an Abrahamic faith. To characterize Buddhism as atheist is to use Western concepts to frame an Eastern religion. Nothing really fits and everything feels like a shoehorn. What precisely is a god? Buddhism originally was a Hindu-derived faith, and it fit right into their spiritual framework. The Buddha didn’t invent spiritual enlightenment, the idea had been floating around under the Sanskrit term, bodhi, meaning ‘perfect knowledge’.

Nobody really knows what the Buddha’s actual enlightenment consisted of. Most seem to think it was dhyana, meditation, the literature holds that Gautama first tried studying philosophy, then asceticism, then finally dhyana, finally procuring enlightenment under a fig tree.

To call the Buddha himself an atheist is, well, not terribly accurate. What we know is that he was concerned mainly with practical techniques, not divine mysteries. In my estimation he was probably spiritually like many of his contemporaries. This means he would have participated in the religious ceremonies and not fought the theological claims of society. Buddhism itself just kind of stays away from the question, not making a claim for or against.

In essence, Buddhism walks and quacks like a religion, but calls itself just a method for finding a certain kind of knowledge. To affiliate that knowledge with atheism doesn’t really help anything other than to serve the goal of allowing you to believe what you want to be true.