To refresh your mind on what we have covered last week, philosophy is a form of passionate pursuit for wisdom. But one cannot just find wisdom by one's free will - it takes grace or divine intervention from above to do so. You will find it in your everyday activities - only you have not noticed it!
I do not think that in our age, we are wiser than our ancestors. If we are, then how come there were 2 great world wars in the last century? We may be faster (think broadband), stronger (tanks and military equipments) and healthier (better healthcare facilities), but we are certainly not more rational than our forefathers. Parents may send their children to tuition after school hours which may only make them smarter but not wiser! Attributes like tolerance, love, kindness, losing one's life in order to find it etc, can only be learned in real life stage.
However, I must confess that there is one field that we have picked up in the past century which the ancients had not - and that is human psychology. Aristotle spent much of his life examining nature. His writings were consumed with little animals, elephants and how much they eat, human anatomy - well, just things of this world. He laid the foundation for medical and biological science. Aristotle, in fact, said very little about the soul, the heavens, life of devotion etc which are of prime concern for a religious person. What he did say was that if humans were the most superior living beings on earth, then we would do well to study human life itself, in this sense what we know to be psychology today.
There seem to be a psychological explanation for everything that we do. Humans have needs that sometimes drive us into religion. There is also the subconscious. Dreams sometimes allow us to do what we cannot do in real life. Even society as a whole has a need (like individual needs) that brings them together.
The journey to heaven is not by way of understanding human psychology (the emotions) or serious study of philosophy (the intellect). But we must always keep these two subjects in mind as we go along. Pascal did say that every rational being must admit that at the end of human reasoning, there is still a huge gap between reason and the heavens.
