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Construction Meaning: Dennis Starkings (1993) identifies the possibility of spirituality outside the religious framework in terms of 'some wisdom, some humanity, some integration of our life's experience' which support us in the way that we 'define ourselves and the world we inhabit' (p. 14). The arts, he suggests, provide us with frameworks of meaning or what Margaret Boden (1994) refers to as areas of 'conceptual space' (p. 79), which direct or provide a basis for the organisation of our experience in terms of this process. The arts are concerned with the construction meaning of meaning at a number of levels.
There is then a strong cultural context to people's ideas about God and the qualities that are attributed to him. In this context the question becomes one of how far God is an independent reality that is a source of experience for believers and how far 'he' is a human construction meaning based on some vague sense of a non material reality along with a collection of cultural, social and moral beliefs. Whether God is an external reality, or a human construction meaning, does not necessarily make his 'reality' any less objective. God may have objective reality in the same way as we might assert objective meaning to a work of art.
If the intentions of the artist are quite clear and if the meaning that is attached by the viewing public to that work corresponds to those intentions then we might talk of a degree, at least, of objectivity in terms of the meaning of this construction. Having said that, the public meaning attached to the concept of God is by no means shared within our multi faith and to a large extent religiously non aligned society. |
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