All our hungers, emotions, fears, inclinations, perceptions, desires, urges, obsessions, wants, instincts and needs answer here. Yet the answer of all the great religions is elsewhere.

It wasn’t always so. The earliest human religions were here religions. Though it’s true, as archaeologists point out, that the practice of burying the dead goes far back into human prehistory, it is nevertheless flawed to interpret ancient practices based on modern bias. Contrary to popular assumptions, there are strong practical and emotional reasons for burials, reasons which don’t themselves point to belief in afterlife. Dead bodies decompose and stink, and become extremely unsanitary. It is emotionally disturbing to see dead humans lying around—quadruply so when it is the body of a loved one. Imagine the emotional impact of seeing animals and vultures clawing and pecking at your dead mate or child.

It’s easy to understand the human desire for burial, quite apart from the question of afterlife. It is merely a modern bias to conclude that burying the dead demonstrates belief in afterlife. It demonstrates only the belief that the dead should be buried. Beyond that we must look for other clues.

The earliest religions were here religions. Their spirits were nature spirits, their gods nature gods; their magic and shamanism were efforts to tap into the unknown powers of nature. Only later did the more sophisticated notion of a separate spiritual world, a world wholly other to everything we see around us, a world of elsewhere come into being.

The more sophisticated religions developed by alienating spirit from body. They developed by associating the mesmerizing azure blue of the sky and the mysterious regularity of the stars at night with the world of spirits and gods. Nature spirits became sky and star gods and goddesses. Eventually the even more sophisticated idea of God arose. And with God, the concept of elsewhere became dominant.

Our urges, emotions, perceptions, desires and instincts answer in unison here, but our intellect began to scream for elsewhere. And that is where we stand today.

Our intellect has made an understandable mistake—but it is a mistake. Splitting spirit from matter, soul from body, supernatural from natural made intellectual sense for thousands of years. But no longer.

Science has now taken us beyond that point. Natural selection and our modern biological understanding of the brain and mind (rudimentary as it is) make it clear that the splits were artificial. We thought they were necessary, but they were not. We were tricked by our own mental processes, the manner in which we must perforce think, into assuming that the world matched.

Science tells us it does not.

Religion is freed to return to its roots: the here and the now. No more alienation. No more elsewhere.

Which is understandable. Feeling are, after all, not thoughts. They can’t be proved—or disproved. They just are.

Which is why religion animates us, and philosophy does not. Religion is built of feelings, not thoughts. That’s why we refer to a religious outlook as a “faith”, and insist one must “have faith”. Religion is a matter of feelings.

And feelings are never wrong.

Nor right.

Only thoughts can be wrong or right—and religion, we see, begins with feelings. With the undeniable.

And yet, we interpret. We give meaning. We declare that this feeling—or that one—is of God. (For a thing built on feelings, there sure is a lot of thought put into religion.)

Thoughts, however, are always right or wrong. They are never undeniable.

So religion carries a core which is undeniable, felt but uninterpreted. And a large halo of thought circles around the core.

Like all thought, it is inherently questionable.

Like all thought, it must be questioned.

But it must always be understood that the religious core—felt but uninterpreted—remains untouched.

The halo of thought is what we usually have in mind when we think of religion. But it is important to remember that it is only peripheral.

It is not our thoughts but the reverence we feel toward certain feelings which constitutes religion. When I feel joy at being a mortal body, or fear and awe before the dark vast forest at night, or gulp the wind into my lungs like delicious draughts of water—that is when I am experiencing religion. If I talk reverently about these feelings, then I am being religious.

But as soon as I leave behind my reverent talk about feelings (my talk of faith), and begin to discuss religious meaning and truth, then I have entered the arena of reason: of skepticism, logical analysis, evaluation. And faith no longer applies.