Reply To: Religion vs Philosophy in the Fundamental Needs
So glad we met!
I’d love if you used these materials in your course, and I’m happy to help if you at any point would like me to.
This is how I was thinking about philosophy/religion:
Philosophy is my wider umbrella that includes religion, not replaces it. I define philosophy as how someone thinks about what is good, true, and beautiful. It includes epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. All people in all times have a philosophy, it’s a human tendency.
Religion is a specific, often culturally integral, way that people answer these questions. What would Ancient Egypt be without its religion?? They organized 3000 years around a singular idea of the afterlife!
But formal religion was too narrow to include all of the ways humans think about what is good, true and beautiful. The scientific method is a philosophy, Ancient Greek stoicism, Buddhism.
A lot of time when children would be researching a philosophy of a culture, it would be religion, but not always!
For the Ancient Greeks, you would have their pantheistic religion and stories, but you’d also get to look into their sense of life! What is honor? What is the good life? Who should rule society? What is freedom? What is real? These are exciting questions! The cultural difference between Sparta and Athens is a deeply philosophical question that the Greeks themselves thought about, but it wasn’t a religious question, both cities believed in the same gods.
It’s super fun to talk to someone about these things!