Is the use of religious teachings the only way to reach enlightenment?

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Anybody saying no needs to better understand where they’re getting their ideas from.

Enlightenment is a religious concept. A religion happens when a Wayshower has such a huge impact on society that a large group of people decide to spend a lot of time expanding on the teachings. Enlightenment is what the people that surrounded the Buddha identified him as being different from all of us.

The people that knew the Buddha, didn’t know what science was. They had to make sense of what the Buddha said using tools that weren’t quite as good as science. And even if they had science, science itself wouldn’t have been able to really make sense of the Buddha. You have to try to fathom the claims of the people that knew the Buddha in order to just understand what the Buddha was trying to teach in his lifetime.

You see these same sorts of dynamics in other religions. Christianity is impossible to understand without going to the New Testament as a source. Otherwise you really can’t grasp what’s going on.

Without being willing to go to a source, then whatever you think about a particular teaching, like enlightenment, is going to be dependent on your own thinking and desires. Taking somebody else’s ideas as truth is de facto theology.

So in short, taking another person’s ideas as gospel truth is undesirable, but it prevents an even worse problem, that of presenting your own ideas as gospel truth. That defeats the whole purpose of spirituality.