Having a firm grasp of the obvious. Wisdom is the ability to see the big picture. It often involves responsibility and a willingness to make the hard choices rather than taking the easy way out. It is often easy to fool one's self into believing what you want to believe rather than what you know is real. It is easy to try to take a shortcut when you know it's the wrong thing to do. It is easy to just go along with the crowd even when you know what the crowd is doing is wrong. Wisdom involves personal strength and integrity and a firm commitment to reality the way it really is.
Wisdom is the result of being a realist and making choices and observations based on reality. Can a wise person be out of touch with reality? Can wisdom flow from a religion that is based on mythology? Only to the extent that the mythology doesn't interfere with reality. After all - isn't reality the measure for which wisdom is tested? Therefore - to be wise is really a matter of perfecting one's personal relationship with the real world and one's personal commitment to the disciplines of realism.
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