A Case for God?

There’s a popular narrative some atheists trip out on that seems to think everybody alive before about 1960, certainly 1860, was simply a complete and utter bloody fool. They just believed in a big interventionist sky pixie called God on the basis of a completely literal reading of the Bible because they were too naïve and thick to know any better. Really? Did they not have brains?

New model atheists also sometimes play off soundbites from one religious tradition against another to prove they’re all rubbish. If there were anything in any of them, they would all say the same thing. To test this approach, you need someone who has actually studied more than one religion historically to find out what they actually have or haven’t said, and how, and why, as a matter of fact, they have developed.

Enter Karen Armstrong. You might agree or not with her conclusions, but she is unquestionably one of the most learned and perceptive historians of comparative religion in the world. She knows a bucketful of languages, history, philosophy and poetry. She is not particularly orthodox or signed up to anything, but she undoubtedly knows her stuff, and has a real knack for getting ideas across.

This is what she says:

We are talking far too much about God these days and what we say is often facile... In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody... There is also a tendency to assume that, even though we now live in a totally transformed world and have an entirely different world-view, people have always thought about God in exactly the same way as we do today. But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept.

She goes on to map out historically those images of God, old and new, that have developed within the world’s major religious traditions over the past 12,000 years. It’s a briliant compact work of historical description — I managed to read it in an 8 hour flight.

The basic idea is that all kinds of sophisticated visions, practises and subtleties flourished in the pre-modern world with a surprisingly high degree of mutual respect, understanding and flashes of emergent coherence. During the early modern period tooled up renaissance people fell in love with the idea of absolute certainty. When they couldn't quite attain it, they over compensated by constructing various formulations of provisional truth to be peddled as absolutes.

Thereby they lost much of the directness, openness, discipline, poetry and praxis of religion. All meanings were narrowed and noddied up for use as polemical rocks. Selective ignorance and paranoia bred fundamentalisms various, including atheistic ones. These are increasingly angry and desperate means of licensing the self to wallow in one, defined over and against all the others.

Taking this narrowed rationalistic approach is very limiting; like playing opera on tinny little speakers. We need to learn how to learn again and wake up to the possibilities for unlocking truth that is not intellectually reductionist and ultimately fascistic. It’s a plea for the recovery of something that wouldn't have needed saying until comparatively recently — that God’s a big lad, and he can look after himself, and we can enjoy the sutlety, poetry and joy of discovering him for ourselves best in communities that are logged in and logged on, not fundamentalist blockhouses.

Living strategy for learning in Oakley

Whole School Planning sounds dreary, but I had a slightly transcendent experience of how it can be done in a really well led school when I went to Oakley last week, an ancient but scattered village best known to 20th century history as the place the Great Train Robbers hid their takings. Children at the Oakley C of E Combined School were brilliant, bubbly and tremendous fun. Questions included “Who made God?” and “how did Jesus come to life again?” as well as the usual ones about Max the Cat and our children.

This school is, humanly speaking, an ideal size of about 100. Everybody really knows everybody else and it feels as though people really do muck in together here to get the best out of each other. The school is wonderfully well in with the village, both historically, and in creative contemporary ways. I noticed the school had arranged with builders of some new houses locally for small groups of children to go and visit regularly and see how houses are built — brilliant! I’d love to have done that when I was 8/9/10!

I was impressed by the Christian learning going on. Year 5 children had been working on Chagall images of the Crucifixion, producing their own, countering the tendency in lesser schools to telescope holy week into an Easter Bunny thang.

The School Council has also been working and consulting on a school prayer for everyone, and there has been really good sustained work to build children’s environmental awarenss in an Eco-school. David Kaboleh, local Vicar, is a frequent and friendly visitor. I liked the kindness tree where various good deeds were recorded, shared and celebrated as leaves on a tree.

I did see something I’ve not seen before, however, behind the Staff room door, with its elegant Simian theme. Jo Garlick and colleagues work closely together, to deliver their school improvement plan. There’s nothing crypto about learning strategy — it's there for everyone to see in the hall. But the staff have a mini version of the School Improvement Plan on the staff room wall. People, including children, use post-its when they undertake work, different colours for different groups (children, staff, governors, parents) and stick them into the whole scheme of what’s going on.

By doing this everybody can relate what they’re doing in the here and now to the broader strategy.

• Everybody can see that they’re part of the whole work of the school, and how.
  
  
• Everybody can see where the gaps are, in any given term.
  

This may sound like some boring bureaucratic thing, but it’s a brilliantly simple idea, that might be effective in all sorts of places (Churches?), and it really seems to work. It shows you can tie everything together strategically without being heavy handed, to keep things moving forward in a really deightful but also highly effective small school.

Hazlemere: Remembering, Learning

Remembrance this year helping with a village war memorial service in Stewkley, orgainsed deftly by the very lively village Royal British Legion, ably led by Dusty Saunders. On the day itself, I was with children at Hazlemere CE Combined School, where years 5 and 6 put on a remarkable Remembrance community service, with guests including local councillors and members of the RAF, as well as RBL.

What really shone through was the depth of thinking and reflection behind the poems, songs and presentation. Children had written their own wartime “letters home”, and I had to check afterwards they hadn’t copied from originals! As well as a great all-age community event, the whole morning showed me the great value of “whole school” working. I know it demands amazing amounts of hard work and co-ordination from staff, but I could see how memorable and moving this all was for the pupils. Congratulations to Nick Waldron (Head) and especially Andrew Sykes and colleagues.

In passing, I also noticed some really engaging story boxes in year 4 (like storyboards but 3D). I was a numeracy governor at the time the numeracy hour came in, and I noticed how consistent working with number lines is producing a whole new quality of work in Maths, in this instance in year 4 (with Mr Rademacher). In the old days people just thought if you were good at notation you understood Maths (why? It’s like saying if you’re good at Crosswords you understand literature). Using number lines over extended periods really builds childrens’ feeling for, and understanding of number in itself. Here’s a subtraction exercise — I’ve blanked the name, but look at the way she’s really getting engaged with numbers, breaking them down, playing with the maths of it, and enjoying herself. This would never have happened in the bad old days, when maths was simply treated as voodoo for clever kids.

I may have disappeared down a slightly anoraky hole! But it’s wonderful to see children enjoying learning together in a great school with their friends. Hazlemere’s a real gem. It isn’t a small school, but somehow it feels like one when you’re there. It’s something about the good relationships, and the ways people treat each other.

As with other Church of England schools in the Thames Valley, it is our privilege to be trusted by many Muslim parents here with their children’s schooling. They don’t, of course, expect technical Quranic learning, just a broad and balanced RE syllabus that builds understanding of all religions. One Muslim parent told me how they appreciated their children to be somewhere God’s name was loved and honoured, so that their Muslim faith is simply respected, shared and nurtured as a way of life, rather than patronised or treated as an exotic hobby.

I asked, in Guardianspeak, “had they ever felt their children were being indoctrinated, narrowed or ghettoised by the experience of being in a faith school?” The parent just fell about laughing.

Faith speaks to Faith. That’s how you build understanding. That’s how schools help build community; and that’s where real hope lies. My Muslim parent did not want compulsory secularism shoved down their child’s throat as the only way, by people who won’t take responsiblity for doing this, and are sniggering at you behind their hands for believing anything more substantial than their own vapid secularism. It was quite an impassioned encounter, and made me realise how different things look in most of this country’s Church schools to how they are often portrayed by Metropolitan élite journalists, projecting their own fears and fantasies from the London experience...