Religion and philosophy

The words 'religion' and 'philosophy' are more or less familiar to us, but do we really know what they mean? Okay, we all have a fairly good grip on what 'religion' means, but 'philosophy' is a word like 'mainframe' or 'broadband' - we know what it is, but we don't know exactly what it is.

I would like to nail that religion to the wall first. Religion is belief in someone or something spiritual as fundamental to our existence. In a broad sense religion will include all religious claims from both the rich and the poor, but religion in a narrow sense would only include the religions with a significant market share.

When common people think of philosophy, they know it is something that is going on at universities, and they know it has something to do with thinking in strange ways. This view is pretty correct, because philosophy is indeed limited to what is going on in the academic discipline Philosophy. Ideally the good philosophical theories should be put into action, mainly by politicians, but the politicians are free to choose selective parts of philosopher's philosophy and use it as they see fit, which makes this channel of ideas weak for deceitful politics.

If we put ourselves at distance to the academic discipline Philosophy, the word 'philosophy' translated from its ancient Greek origin "love of knowledge", or maybe "love of wisdom". Philosophy isn't only for the aristocrats, it's for everybody, philosophy is what is really really true, what is true for real...

...if there is such a thing as truth. The philosophers disagree. Some claim that objective truth is real, and others claim that objective truth doesn't exist. To make it more complicated, some claim that there is objective truth, but that we can't comprehend it.

Philosophers tend to prefer to philosophize about the traditional topics like moral behaviour, political philosophy, philosophy of science, metaethics, metaphysics, and the all-time-favourite; religion. Surprisingly much philosophy tend to confirm God, or maybe not surprising?

I will wrap this up now and celebrate my first blog-post on Eloquent Consequence, and I would like to use this opportunity to thank you for reading my blog. To finish this off, I will toss out a question for you to think about to check your philosophical skills:
Do you know the difference between morals and ethics?