What religion still answers

The horrifying terror of the unknown, then and now

Imagine living in the middle ages. You might be someone who takes care of land or someone who takes care of cattle. In both cases, you would be very dependent on the weather, including the sun.
But one day, while the farmers and shepherds are doing their work, the midday light starts to fade, although not like a storm is coming. The sky is clear. A dark object is slowly taking away the sun, almost like it’s eating it.
The solar eclipse was an understood phenomenon to scholars of the era, but would not be widely known to the public for hundreds of years, so the threat to something so essential was not just real, but also completely unknown and unexplainable. And it was a reason to believe in mysterious forces beyond their understanding.

In our modern society, our scientific understanding of the natural world has advanced so much that few threats to any of our essential needs are unknown or unexplainable, and new threats, like pandemics, can be considered in the context of existing scientific frameworks, even when those frameworks offer incomplete predictions.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is useful here, even in its rough form. The lower tiers, the things that have to be true for life to continue, are exactly where science has done its most thorough work.
Using the terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, our physiological (such as air, food, and water) and safety (security, employment, and health) concerns can be influenced by nature, of course, but we fully understand how, can predict when, and in most cases can actually protect ourselves from those threats.
Because of that, those of us who are not religious tend to underestimate the power of religion to reassure people in the face of existential questions with no scientific answers.

Consider the afterlife, a domain science is structurally unable to investigate. Religions have elaborate frameworks for it: what it might look like, and what one can do in this life to shape what comes next.
We might think that the reason people fail to find religious frameworks for the afterlife attractive is because of the logical counterarguments secular people make. But the logical conclusion of that line of thinking would be that intellectual rigor predicts religious belief. This is, of course, contradicted by all the scientists, lawyers, doctors and other highly educated people who do believe in a God and in the corresponding teachings of the afterlife.
I believe the common trait of people who are not swayed by the religious framing of the afterlife is that death does not trigger in us the horrifying terror of the unknown.

I am sometimes envious of religious people, because they get to claim answers to the questions that we secular people simply do not have answers to. Of course, as a secular person, the religious answers to the questions of why we are here, what our purpose in life might be, and what comes after life are deeply unsatisfactory, which is why I cannot believe in any religion. But the benefit of being able to believe is clear, natural and understandable.
As secular people, we must accept that we do not have answers to our unanswered questions that provide the same reassurance that religious people do. And just because we may have gotten to the point where these unanswered questions are no longer existential, we cannot lose empathy for people for whom those questions are existential, and require a framework to answer them. Religious frameworks provide that reassurance, and we must be humble enough to admit that our non-answers do not provide such a framework. They cannot provide the reassurance that some people need.

What separates secular from religious people is need for reassurance, not intellectual sophistication. Understanding this, we can have empathy for their need and humility about the limits of our own frameworks. In figuring out how to live, we each take the path that reassures our most pressing needs. Whether the question is the sun disappearing or our own death.