Question by aedgagt: Whats the difference between philosophy and religion?

Best answer:

Answer by Phil S
A philosophy is an outlook on life and how to live it. A religion is a set of beliefs regarding one or more deities. Most religions come with a philosophy (a view on how you should live) but philosophies dont come with a religion.

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Question by Gloop: Can anyone compare and contrast philosophy and religion?
I need help comparing philosophy and religion
Can you guys help by listing how they are different and how they are the same?

Some links might help;
Thank you

Best answer:

Answer by Siddhartha
Philosophy had 2 children…….Science & Religion. They haven’t always gotten along.

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Question by Aztrik: Which Universities offer masters degrees in Religious studies, or the philosophy of Religion?
I want a school that will alow me to study in depth a wide variety of religions in an objective comparitive manner. and also prepare me to teach religious studys courses on a college level. I am not intrested in a simminary school.

Best answer:

Answer by sbjohns
Look it up on Princeton Review’s website–you’ll have to sign up for an account but it saves which schools fit your profile. That way, you can see which schools offer degrees that fall into the “religion” category and weed them out from there.

Good luck!

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Question by Bethany: Can you briefly introduce, define and/or clarify the “philosophy of religion” ?
I would appreciate an unbiased approach to this topic using only your own personal point of view or expertise because I can always search the websites for myself.
Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Best answer:

Answer by 4mat
no you cant, briefly…

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Question by lilcutie: how might feminist philosophy of religion approach the question of the nature and existence of God?
Would it be any different to a male dominated responce?

Best answer:

Answer by Just a Nobody
Explain the feminist philosophy of religion. Also which religion? Religion is a vast plethora of beliefs. No one will defend them all. I don’t agree with ALL religion.

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Whenever individuals explore and analyze religion, one common, but unfortunate word people use is,‘cult’. Whenever people don’t like religious or spiritual groups, it’s not uncommon to bring up the word ‘cult’, with no real comprehension of the difference those and legitimate organized religions. The reason for this is actually very simple to see.

For example, in the event you fail to follow Christian Biblical concepts strictly, the Christian Protestant Fundamentalists think you a cult. Although they perhaps originally intended that to demean only those Christian denominations that somehow “were misguided”, that definition now extends clearly also includes Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, … In fact, because at least 2/3 of the world’s population doesn’t identify with any sort of Christian, almost 70% of all of us are therefore ‘members of a cult’.

But, the problem goes even deeper than that. The Protestant fundamentalists have continued to expand their cult list by including Roman Catholics along with all Easter Orthodox faiths, over a disagreement over the number of sacraments there are. By those standards, 93% of the people on the planet are involved in cults. To take it 1 step further, they also think most other Christian Protestant groups to have fallen out of compliance with biblical fidelity. So, for these men and women, virtually the only singular group of people on the planet who aren’t in a cult is them!

Whenever different groups examine these extraordinarily strict doctrinal interpretations, they frequently believe that anyone following them has lost all individualized thought, and must therefore be a member of a cult. To much of the rest of the planet, it’s actually these biblically strict, narrow groups who are the true cults. Taken together, that includes everybody. Everyone on the planet is a member of a cult — according to somebody! The Baptists are pointing fingers at the Catholics who are pointing fingers at the Protestants – and everyone is pointing fingers at the Mormons.

Whenever you paint anything with such a broad brush, it’s pointless; as Joey on ‘Friends’ once said, “The point is Moo — because who cares what a cow thinks?

So, is there any way to redeem the word, so it can have some meaning of value? The main issue is that those who are creating the definitions are lacking neutrality. They’ve got an agenda. The thing we need is someone else to give us a neutral means to identify a cult — someone without a personal interest in the decision. That individual can be the ‘anthropologist of religion’.

An anthropologist of religion is someone who studies the field of religion from a scientific standpoint. Sometimes they’ve got a particular religion to which they adhere, and other times they don’t. This will make some members from the organized religions rather uncomfortable. If the anthropologist belongs to a religion — any religion — the other people scream “bias! bias!”, and everything the anthropologist has to say must be wrong because they’ve got this personal bias.|If it happens that the individual belongs to a particular religion, all the others shout, ‘Bias! Bias! — and ignores anything stated.

If, on the other hand, the anthropologist doesn’t take part in any specific religion, the others scream “atheist! atheist!”, and everything this anthropologist says has got to be biased on the fact that they’re simply opposed to all religious beliefs. Drama and accusation aside, how do these neutral parties define cults?

Usually, the majority of them define a cult by using a specific ‘five point system’. The answers to the the following questions will make it clear whether or not the group is a cult.

These are:

1. Does the group have a charismatic, strong leader (or leaders)

Two. Does the group squash individuality as well as independent thought?

3. Is there a denial of intimacy by excluding or alienating friends or relatives?

Four. Do they apply financial pressure and abuse for the welfare of the group, even at the personal expense of the adherent?

Five. Does the group keep its members separated from their surrounding community?

Even using this approach, the problem is that it still isn’t black and white. If all 5 questions are answered “yes”, then it easily qualifies as being a cult. Obviously, if every one of the answers is no, then it’s absolutely NOT a cult. If it were only The hard part is when, as is the case with most groups, the answer is “yes” to a number of questions between those two extremes. you are unlikely to find any solid answers, so the best we can do is really a sort of sliding scale.

It’s always easy to handle to fully grasp with a real-life situation.

One Case Study of a Cult — The People’s Temple. This is the title of the church founded by the Reverend James Warren “Jim” Jones — over nine hundred folks that committed suicide in Jonestown, Guyana back in 1978.

Ask yourself those aforementioned five questions:

(a). They had Jones as a leader – strong and charismatic.

(b) they thought as a group and weren’t allowed to have any ideas to call their own.

(c) they ended encouraged strongly to exclude their friends as well as relatives from every aspect of their lives and their church activities.

(d) The members more than tithed, they basically gifted all everything they owned to the church, and were in turn cared for by the church (the group was entirely communist);

(e) When their isolation from the surrounding community began to break down, they relocated to a remote spot inside the jungles of South America.

All five factors had been met, so they clearly were a cult.

A 2nd Case Study – Jehovah’s Witnesses. Founded in the late 1800s by Charles Taze Russell, these are the folks that you are likely to come across when they knock on your door.

Let’s compare them to the same five questions:

(a) They do not have a particular leader, strong or otherwise.

(b) They believe that as a result of independent bible study, everybody will eventually come to the same conclusions that they have.

(c) Witnesses ask people they don’t know as well as relatives to teach what they think they have learned;

(d) While it’s frequently true that Witnesses devote a lot of their time and effort trying to convert others, there does not appear to be any monetary pressure – not any more so than any other church encourages tithing.

(e) It’s their lack of separation from the nearby community that often has them at odds with their neighbors.

They meet none of the criteria. Jehovah’s Witnesses are definitely not a cult.

Bottom Line: determining properly whether a group is a cult is unrelated to their biblical interpretations, and needs to instead be determined by sociological criteria unrelated to the religious position of the group. Whether cults are dangerous or not depends on which cult. Just because it’s a cult, does not make it automatically dangerous, but any one or any thing that discourages independent thought, is ultimately bad for you.

This is an excerpt of 1 lesson (of 30) from the Master of Religious Philosophy course offered through the Universal Life Church Seminary. We have many courses available and each one carries with it a degree at the end of the course.

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web, answers questions submitted through YouTube — www.freedomainradio.com

Question by busty_brunette: How might a feminist philosophy of religion approach the question of the nature and existence of God?
Would it be different from a male’s approach

Best answer:

Answer by iansamadhi
Actually it already exists. In Egyptian (Nut) and Pantheistic (Gaia) religions.
The typical male based religion will use a creator God metaphor, who makes things, and sets up the universe as a system of government. with God as king.
The typical female based religion views the world as an organic entity, a living whole, coming out of the womb of nothingness; alive now, as opposed to a machine, set in motion by a manufacturing creator, at sometime in the past.

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Imagination is only a groping. It has no value unless it is divinely inspired, for then it becomes inspiration. Completely new terms can be made up by new-age authors. A lot of science fiction and fantasy movies also come up with several new terms which you might not have heard before. Ingenious sure, but empty all the same. Sometimes they run out of terms to explain what they are trying to say, so what do they do? They borrow from other age-old cultures and just use terms superficially. So, before one reads new-age books, one must read some real spiritual books, try to have real inner experience, and then you will have the discerning ability to tell the real from the false. But if you rather just be swooped up in some fancy imagination than the real truth, then you should just continue reading novellas and short stories and have fun.

 Imagination, as beautiful and as creative as it can be at times, is aesthetically pleasing but is also vacant and void and often baseless and non-revealing of any higher truth. It may correspond to something higher in a very faint and obscure way but it has the danger of leading you astray and away from the harsh realities that must be endured on the way to the truth if you lack discernment and rational discrimination. Imagination is a tool for us lower beings with our limited mentality and our obscure groping for truth. However, if used well it can be a good tool to reach out into the unrealized possibilities, and our minds could be like antennae that pick up on the unmanifest and will to create it here in the material realm. Some beings tend to have more power to realize and manifest what they imagine and sometimes it betters humanity and sometimes it worsens and sometimes it’s neither. It comes from the universal mind. The universe is impartial so it allows the complete and utter realization of any possibility that can be thought up and there is nothing we can imagine that isn’t already contained in the framework of the universe. It may not exist in our current world or be a part of our present existence but it still exists in seed state or realized in subtler realms. Otherwise, somebody like a Tesla could never have invented things that were yet incomprehensible to most people then. So, I admit that imagination can be used as a tool towards realization of truth, but when one ascends to higher levels of consciousness, the dependence on imagination recedes and must be abandoned in favour of inspiration and intuition combined with higher discrimination from higher and deeper realms. Also, there is a strong will required and a detailed thought process involved in converting these ideations, imaginations or inspirations into something material that is utilizable and applicable in Life.

Things that have fancy names and are colourful and make a lot of noise obviously lack content and attract attention through vacant polysyllables. The beauty should be in the content and the living truth that it represents, not some far off fantasy. These things often don’t have a definite demarcation between them. We can ideate and try to define them but that would lower its content. Then it loses value. Our language is insufficient to express higher truths. So one must first realize and live in the truth oneself and then transform one’s own being entirely before his exterior equipments (mind, life, body) are ready to express it without dilution or distortion. But most new age authors just read a lot of ancient history and scriptures from various great civilizations of the past and then just use their extremely imaginative mind to make up their own little world by which they then try and proselytize undeveloped minds. And people just buy into it because it’s been published as a book. These shouldn’t receive more importance than a novel or a short story that took you on a surreal journey yet when you’re back on the ground you must use your rational mind to discern the truth alone. Often times certain novels and stories written in the right spirit expresses more truth than this new-age nonsense. It is just a marketing gimmick. I am all for synthesizing and integrating truths from various timeless cultures but it has to be a synthesis of truth and truth alone. It must not be a mere enthusiastic and ecclesiastical orgy of polysyllables and exotic terminology engineered to invade the undeveloped minds of the ignorant mass. It must be an integration of the essence and not just terms and false symbols. None of these authors have had any authentic spiritual realizations. Neither is their outer nature transmuted enough to express the truth in any form.

 Almost all ancient texts from around the world are esoteric in the sense that they contain hidden truths, which they represent in an interactive, often extra-logical ways; kind of like a fairy tale. They exaggerate it to such an extent that it is purposely meant for you to look beyond the literal and into the deeper psychological subtleties leading to truths. However, majority of the world still hasn’t developed much of a thought-force and rather not think and just repose on the mundane. Once you have been awakened to deeper meaning behind the ancient symbolism, your perspective changes for ever. You tend to see it everywhere you look.

Terms such as religion, God, spirit and soul have all been corrupted indeed, by the limited understanding of puny minds. So, when science advanced, it found it easy to disprove all the so called “religious” truths because even the so called “religious and spiritual” leaders did not have a proper understanding of their own beliefs as science did of science. So materialism took over and we see the world today as its most extreme form. It seems today that matter and spirit are mutually exclusive but the perfect reconciliation of the two is what will set humanity free and immortal.

In the words of the great Seer-poet-philosopher Sri Aurobindo:

 ”Atheism in Europe has been a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish exoteric religionism and its popular inadequate and crudely dogmatic notions.”

This sort of atheism, materialism, capitalism, positivism and agnosticism is more pronounced in the west than the East. In the east there never was and possibly never will be such an unbridgeable gap between spirituality, mysticism, Religion and Science because all Eastern philosophies work towards synthesis and reconciliation. This comes easy to them because they start from an essential unity whereas all western thought begins from a multiplicity and differentiation and division. The West tends to live in the realm of the mind which has a natural tendency to division and separation and exclusive analysis and thus cannot look at the whole. It takes a part for the whole and gives it an absolute value. Thus its perspective is limited only to that portion no matter how large the portion. Eastern thought on the other hand views the world from the largeness and vastness of the spirit and thus even the most opposite of principles fuse into one essentially instead of an eternal dichotomy.

Science is still playing catch up to Spirituality & Occultism, which have a few thousand years of head start. Yet science arrogantly claims the findings as its own & discredits others; fails to acknowledge the truth in them. Perhaps, it has become a new kind of dogma and a new church. The Power of the Mantra, known to ancients millennia ago is now starting to be accepted by science as per the article by Grazyna Fosar and Franz Bludorf, “Scientist Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed by Words & Frequencies”. Take the long route science. I shall be waiting on the mountain peaks of the Spirit, if & when you transcend your limiting intellect & eventually get there. For our destination is the same.

However, Science cannot be completely discredited or dismissed. Science has made an immense contribution in terms of analyzing and classifying details of creation. It has brought to light the minute and detailed workings of world nature and physical matter and is constantly moving towards further perfection. However, it must work within its limits and stick to what it knows and what it’s expertise entails. It must not state its claim on non-physical or supra-physical phenomenon using physical means. It must constantly move towards a truth and be flexible in its approach and not be fixed in its ways. It must be willing to accept other possibilities beyond the physical and widen its scope and its future development. It must not become a new religion but be constantly in pursuit of truth be willing to accommodate varied viewpoints if it is to enlarge its scope.

The superficiality and the superfluousness of the world can be really frustrating at times and the Ignorance and stupidity that brews daily is just simply repugnant. However, we can only try and live the truth. That is the only way we can lead by example. Whatever truth is concretely and subjectively realized must be objectified and externalized in life and must constantly remain living. This is what the ancient rituals of various traditions such as Vedas and Tantras aimed at when they translated their inner realization as outward rites and actions. However, they have a tendency to become mechanical over time since the average man is unable to see the living truth behind the form and hold it in his heart and mind whilst performing such a rite. Hence, Spiritual realization must come first and we must be a conscious instrument, forever spontaneously acting out the truths based on the intimations received from that infinite spiritual space.

Reason used upon itself and for itself only leads to agnosticism and facts or logic leave no room for other possibilities. Reason must be used to transcend

Question by Hmmm: Is it possible to unite religion, philosophy and science into one term, the truth, or search for?
not*
Do they all no hold value?
One common search for the truth. Add spirituality to that list too.
Do they all not* hold value?

Best answer:

Answer by china doll 3
No

What do you think? Answer below!

Question by Hmmm: Is it possible to unite religion, philosophy and science into one term, the truth, or search for?
not*
Do they all no hold value?
One common search for the truth. Add spirituality to that list too.
Do they all not* hold value?

Best answer:

Answer by china doll 3
No

Give your answer to this question below!