Religion is the study or practice of preexisting beliefs, generally involving faith. Beliefs refer to people’s understandings and perceptions of things.
It was historically believed that the Spanish Inquisition was a bloody religious persecution full of torture and genocide, but recent data shows this view is essentially a myth created by Protestants to slander Catholics.
“Civil Religion” is the civic “religion” of a nation. It doesn’t describe the theological religion of a nation, but rather a quasi-religious shared identity built around national symbolism and customs.
We often attribute the origin of the state of nature argument to Hobbes, but it can be traced to thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and the Sophists in the 300s BC, and is then mused on by other early philosophers.
Historically, Protestantism is like classical liberalism (individual liberties and rights) and Catholicism is like social liberalism (state enforced social justice).
Modern banking originated in Italy around 1150 as Jews fleeing persecution brought new practices, including “discounting”, to the merchant banks of the Italian piazzas.
Below we present an annotated version of Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay Wealth (better known as the Gospel of Wealth).
We present a list of vices and virtues and look at vices and virtues as understood by philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas.
Western Classical Element Theory can be seen as a metaphor the human condition where fire is will and action, air is reason, water is the passions and spirit, and earth is the physical.
Saul Alinsky wasn’t a satanist, nor did he dedicate Rules for Radicals to Lucifer. Alinsky simply used Lucifer as a literary device to teach community organizing.
Srinivasa Ramanujan had no formal mathematics training in his early years. He did his research in isolation, rediscovering old theorems and producing new ones.