Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
And so to Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God – is it the case for religion? I have heard it described as a defence of unknowing rather than faith.
ut what is God other than a state of total unknowing? One can’t know God with one’s mind. She quotes George Steiner saying one cannot begin to understand intellectually the impact that music has on oneself. And so with experiences of God: it means absolutely nothing at all, it is of absolutely of no consequence, that Richard Dawkins and the whole crew dismiss God. Because God is not an intellectual experience. But it is a human experience, to do with consciousness, an experience of being, not of having. She talks about the attempts of all the various religions to claim God for their own culture and often for their own gender: God is often phallocentric, and very elitist, and often rather elderly. And that is a grabbing hold of and a claiming of something that is only knowable through complete humility and not through acquiring, but rather letting go. And it is something that is so much at one’s very core that it is a journey to the place where you began, but knowing it for the first time, as T S Eliot said [‘The end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.’ Four Quartets: Little Gidding].
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Anthony Seldon is a contemporary historian, political biographer and educationalist. He has written books on Churchill, Thatcher, Major and Blair and has recently argued for the need to tackle the collapse of trust in British public life. As Master of Wellington College, a major co-educational public school, he has pioneered lessons in happiness and well-being for teenagers.
