Religion not The Answer, says Andrew Sullivan

On The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Maybe religion is best understood not as The Answer to The Question, but as the only human response to the most pressing human fact – our own death. Oakeshott places religious life in the mode of practice, not in the mode of philosophy. I have struggled with this argument for a long time, but the older I get, the wiser it seems.

You and I will both die. To the question of what becomes of us then, science has a simple answer. We decompose and rot and eventually become dust. But the human mind, because it is human, resists that as the final answer to the question of our destiny. We find it very hard to think of ourselves as not being. That resistance is always there. There is no escaping it. I predict you will feel it at the hour of your death, if you have any time to contemplate it. This resistance to our own extinction is part of science and part of our genetic impulse to survive – but also why we feel ourselves connected to something eternal.

Is this sense of an after-life an illusion? We cannot know for sure. But death isn’t an illusion. And when death is nearest, faith emerges most strongly. You can either see this as a reason to pity people of faith – they’re too weak to look mortality in the face and deal with it. Or you can see this as part of the wisdom of people of faith: we know what we are, and we have reached a way of dealing with it as humans, full humans, not just arguments without minds and bodies. Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.

I agree that religion is not The Answer (to whatever question). But that all-embracing existence that goes by the name of Spirit, Brahman, Emptiness, or God–that is The Answer (to many questions, among them: Who am I? what is the nature of Life?) By failing to state this clearly and instead offering up faith as a reasonable belief in the survival of the human being outside of a body, Sullivan misses the point of The Answer entirely.

The materialistic denial of Spirit to which Sullivan responds is worthy of response, and Sullivan’s impulse towards a reasoned, post-mythic understanding of faith is more correct than not. Sullivan doesn’t err in his understanding of religion. But Sullivan doesn’t go far enough in his thinking about God (not religion). Belief that religion is essentially about denial of death is probably correct, but faith in Spirit has nothing to do with any consequence or impact on human affairs of such belief. In plain English, the matter of the immortality of the soul matters to religion, but doesn’t matter to Spirit. Spirit accepts and embraces all; Spirit is alive and existent, filled with the abundance of life, regardless of what you or I or Andrew might believe about the immortality of the soul.

Spirit is The Answer. Faith is a gift from Spirit to support human beings along the course of our development towards greater and fuller and wiser understandings of the nature of existence. Faith supports our feeble bodies and minds and souls as we grope from one less-than-perfect understanding of Life to another vision, higher and wiser but still imperfect and partial, sustaining us through the periods of darkness and nurturing us in more comfortable times. No answer to the question of religion is complete without acknowledging these truths.