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Human Construction: 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 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, 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.
The cover was an in dustrial photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of th< construction of a great dam near Fort Peck, Montana, k the style for which, as a photographer for Fortune, she was noted. The opening picture story, however, focused not on the construction, but on the life of the builders oi the dam and their families in temporary cities in the desert. It was not what the editors had assigned, and they wrote, by way of introduction:
What the Editors expected—for use in some later issue-were construction pictures as only Bourke-White can take them. What the Editors got was a human document of frontier life which, to them at least, was a revelation.
There are two broad views that underlie the religious education debate and that reflect fundamental philosophical doctrines, that is,on the one hand the extent to which we see understanding and experience as based on an external reality, i.e. realism, and on the other, the notion of understanding as based primarily on human needs and interests that may be seen to be factors in determining, or at least, focusing experience. This latter view sees reality, at least in part, as a construction. If God, insofar as we might place 'him' at the centre of spiritual experience, or perhaps as a metaphor for spirituality, is a human construction, it might still be appropriate to talk of pupils 'discovering' him as an objective reality just as one 'discovers' the music of Beethoven during one's musical education. Alternatively one might wish to see pupils as constructing their own 'vision' or 'concept' in the context of what others have said about 'him'. |
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