I think to understand philosophy, you have to understand much of everything else around you and history. My own philosophy is: interpret the world for what it is, not what you want it to be or what some 'expert' tells you contrary to what the real world is. If the experts told you the sky is red and you looked outside and saw that the sky is blue, it does not matter how much statistics they have or how many times the purty colors flash on the TV, the sky is blue.
You have to consider your own personal history too. I thought and believed in some things like how most of today's young people (you might call them Gen Y) think and what they believe in. That what how I functioned up until about 8 years ago. I don't know what happened, but something, I have no idea if it was some kind of spirit or non-corporeal lifeform or whatever, came to me in a vision during a homecoming game in the year 1999. For about 20 - 30 seconds I swore I saw a city of the future, I can't even describe the place to you very well since it was so alien to me. After that, I had to leave the game and get my thoughts together for I had no idea of what that encounter was.
What I didn't know was that day was the last day I would be a normal 17 year old. Shortly after the encounter, my life improved quite a bit. My grades improved, I recieved college invitations, I went basically from being at the bottom of the social ladder in my school to top notch in a matter of a few months. Problem was, I realized I never could associate with the other members of my generation again and to this day, I take an isolationist stance towards Gen Y. Sorry, but that is how things work for me now. I cannot be a friend or aquaintence to them, we are two different peoples and it is likely that we never will intermingle again. I suppose you have a price to pay for everything, no?
Anyways, I went from the philosophy of "for God, country and family" to the idea that we are entering a new millenium where God and country sadly won't be around for much longer. As for family, we will treat family as it should be, family. Not as some commodity for political bargaining. I think that we as human beings will have to give more freedom, not restrict it more. We are entering a new world where much of the rules and regulations and such won't work very well. The more you take away freedom, the more enraged a people become. Human nature abhors a repressive environment, and this is something that most people don't seem to get. If you vote to take away freedoms from LGBT people, I can guarantee that they will take away freedoms from you as well. It will happen eventually. It does not matter if you believe in capitalism or socialism or any 'mix' of the two, they are irrelevant as to the amount of freedom in a nation. It does not matter if you vote "Blue" or "Red", both major ideologies advocate for authoritarian forms of law. This may get political but then again you really can't seperate politics and religion and philosophy from one another. YOu could say that politics is religion put into law.
