What is the difference between a philosophy and a religion?

To a Western Mind (Christian Secular World)(Europe and North and South America and more) a religion believes in God or Gods and a philosophy does not.

However, to an Eastern Mind (the rest of the world) there may be no difference between a philosophy and a religion at all.

I know this is a very simplistic explanation but generally it works to explain the difference between how a western mind perceives this and an eastern mind perceives this, primarily because outside of Hinduism most Eastern minds do no believe in God. So, I suppose this way of looking at things would be sort of incomprehensible to a western mind. However, just in Asia we have 4 billion people or more with maybe 1 billion of those Hindus or less who believe in Gods and those who believe in one God are a small minority, unless you are including the Pacific Islands where there are many Christians and Muslims too.

This is why the old saying, "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" was once so powerful. This is much less true today because of both education and travel and jet airplanes and people traveling all over the world.

For example, when I left for India, Nepal, Thailand and Japan in 1985 in December with my family, I had a sort of New Age Christian view of reality, including my perception of Buddhism. But, when I arrived I found Buddhism as practiced in all these countries was completely different than anything I could have imagined. So, I found it not useful to try to fully explain this to people back in the United States.

Though the forms of Buddhism are equally valuable to Westerners and Easterners you will find that most Westerners often are Equally Christian and Buddhist at the same time. Whereas in Asia you are either Buddhist or Christian or Hindu or whatever or you don't believe in any religion at all. People don't combine religions in Asia much like it is stylish to do in the western World. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe in the future Eastern Nations peoples might become more like the Western United States where people often combine the best parts of all religions and philosophies to use what suits them and works for them in a practical way in their lives.

note: (or they don't believe in anything). I realized that this isn't really correct above when I said this. People tend to all believe in something even if it is only believing in themselves or believing in "Eat, Drink and be Merry for tomorrow we die."

 Do you live by a Philosophy or a Religion?