The challenges to our beliefs come primarily from the seminal figures that inaugurated the world's philosophical and religious traditions, such as Socrates, Democritus, Confucius, Lao-Tsu, Buddha, Moses, and Jesus and secondarily from the major philosophical figures who have preserved and elaborated these traditions down to the present day. An utterly significant aspect of philosophizing lies in the disagreements in belief, some very deep, between these major traditions and, what is often ignored, within each of them. Hence a major component of philosophizing is to seek an explanation, even the true explanation, of these disagreements, as one of the basic issues that matters greatly in our common life. Religion broadly defined is a comprehensive response to what is taken to be the ultimate reality. Hence it provides, or more precisely, the world religions provide answers to the same range of large questions which preoccupy philosophers.
Religion precedes philosophy, both in human history and in the history of an individual person.
This connection suggests that one's philosophical orientation, in its broadest sense of a world and life view, springs from one's religious outlook on the world. Philosophy is religion, with a different name, mode, and function in human experience. As a Western philosopher, I have come to believe there are fundamentally just two, which Augustine identified as the heavenly City of God and the earthly City of Man. This will be, as I see it, a very perplexing question for Twenty-First Century Western philosophy, as it will be in turn very perplexing for Eastern philosophy to ask how it should think of the West. There is of course no room here for dogmatism, but there is no room either for a veil of noncomittedness.