Summer Holidays

I hope everybody is enjoying their summer holidays and that you’ve all been getting behind Team GB. I’m off to London tomorrow to cheer on the Brownlees.

I’ve just got back from a very relaxing week in the West Country, and on a trip to Bath’s Roman Baths Museum I found this rather nice carving of a Celtic Triple Goddess:

I say Celtic Triple Goddess, but on second thoughts it does look a bit like more evidence for those ancient aliens...

Notes on Hume and Kant

For any AS Philosophers out there, here is a link to a useful PowerPoint file that recaps some key vocabulary for the AQA unit on Reason and Experience, plus the views of Hume and Kant. Remember that any of these keywords could come up in AS exam questions, so make sure you know them inside out.

Thank you and goodbye

Just a short note to say how much I’ve enjoyed my time at RGS and that I'm really going to miss my fellow teachers and all my amazing students. Thank you for being patient with me when I occasionally lose an essay or two, for your dazzling knowledge of seminal 90s rock bands (even when the exam question wasn’t really about that Nirvana), and for generally being such a pleasure to teach.  Thank you also for the goodbyes, cards, chocolate, games making kits, music bucket lists, books, and death metal CDs. They were much appreciated.

Years 12 and 13: I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for you come results day, and I’ll try to pop into school to congratulate you on your results (which I’m sure will be stunning). Year 9 Philosophers: you’re a brilliant class and I’m sure you’ll do really well in your AS. I’ll be keeping in touch with Mr G to check you’re not slacking off!

I’ve got a few things I want to blog about over the Summer following on from my VU sessions, and then when I start at my new school in September, I’m planning to blog regularly about the topics I’ll be teaching. They won’t be exactly the same as the things you’ll be studying at RGS, but there should still be plenty of overlap, so I hope you’ll still drop in on the blog from time to time.

Thank you and goodbye.

Mr R

Questions on Mythicism and Denial Movements

A big thank you to those of you who participated in my Virtually University sessions on Mythicism and the question of Jesus’ existence. From talking to other teachers, I wonder if my class was more a chat about some stuff I find interesting than a proper university style lecture, but hey - it was more fun than teaching the ontological argument.

I was really impressed by the quality of some of the thinking and the questions you raised, and pleasantly surprised that many of you could anticipate some key Mythicist arguments and the counter-arguments to these. I was also pleased that a couple of you had even heard of exciting things like Q and the apocryphal gospels... though on reflection, perhaps you’ve just been watching The Da Vinci Code?

I did say that I would post some follow up work for you, so here it is. Below are a few questions that I think were raised in the course of our sessions:

• How strong is the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus?
• How convincing is the mythicist case against the existence of Jesus?
• Why makes some people reject the consensus view of experts in particular field?
• What is the role of ideology in shaping way denial movements use evidence and the conclusions they draw?
• Is mythicism a denial movement?
•  Is rejection of human-caused global warming a form of denial?
• Is denying scientific consensus (such as evolution or HIV as a cause of AIDS) different to denying historical consensus (such as the existence of Jesus)?

Please could you pick one of these questions, research the issues raised, and write me a response.  I won’t ask for it to be done by Monday – I’d rather you took your time doing some reading and thinking and came back to me later, even if it’s in the holidays. I’m also planning to post my own thoughts on a few of these questions over the next week or two, so you may wish to read those posts too.

You can either email me your work to my school account or post them as a comment below, though please remember the house rules.

Reading around Philosophy and Religion

If you’re planning to take A level Religious Studies, then you’ll benefit from doing a little background reading to understand some of the issues and questions you’ll be thinking about. So below is a short list of some books that I think A level RS students should try reading, and that should be easy to find in the library or on Amazon.

(Actually, if you were in my A level taster session last week, then it’s your summer work, so you don’t have much say in the matter – pick a book and dive in!)

Books on Religion and Philosophy

Gods, Demons and Others – R.K. Narayan

The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins

The Puzzle of God – Peter Vardy

The Pig That Wants to be Eaten – Julian Baggini

Religion and Philosophy in Fiction

The Guide – R.K. Narayan

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig

The Screwtape Letters – C.S. Lewis

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder

Of these books, Sophie’s World might be the most obvious choice for a future A level student: the story revolves around a teenage girl (Sophie) and an unusual Philosophy course she studies, so it gives a good introduction to key philosophers and their ideas: I think it’s even used as an introductory text book in some US colleges. On the other hand, some people (myself included) have found it quite hard to get into, as the plot is a little confusing at times.

These books certainly aren’t the only books you could find that deal with philosophical questions. For me, most great literature explores themes and issues that philosophers have also been interested in investigating - touching on these deeper issues is part of what makes them great. Equally, good books on other subjects such as science, history or psychology could raise philosophical questions, so if you’re doing some background reading for another subject, you can still keep your philosophy hat on.

You’ll find a few more suggestions here and here. And, while we’re on the topic, next time you’re planning an evening that involves DVDs and popcorn, why not try a philosophical film?

Happy reading. 

On Gods and Aliens

One of my students shared a link on our class Facebook group that shows some examples of religious art that might represent ancient encounters with alien astronauts.

Ancient astronaut theory – the view that aliens visited the Earth long ago and made contact with our ancestors, and may have been responsible for the development of human technology, religion, or even human life itself – is certainly intriguing. It’s easy to understand why an encounter with a highly advanced alien race would have a profound impact on an ancient civilisation, and how such beings or their technologies could be seen as magical or even divine. Actually, we know that something similar has happened in the case of cargo cults in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hey if, you can mistake Prince Phillip for a divine being, anything’s possible...

On the other hand, it’s safe to say that the ancient astronaut theory is currently very much on the fringe: I can’t see it appearing on your A level RS syllabus any time soon to compete with the views of Freud and Marx on the origins of religion.

I’m a bit of a sci-fi geek, so I have a certain soft spot for daft theories involving aliens and outer space. The connections between religion and science fiction are interesting, but I think a much simpler explanation is that religious art has influenced the depiction of aliens rather than vice versa – certainly, it would be easier to show how science fiction has drawn upon religious themes and imagery than that religion originated with a bunch of pre-historic E.T.s visiting planet Earth.

I won’t spend too long talking about the evidence or the problems with ancient alien theory, though if you want to check out some of the problems with it, this site seems fairly comprehensive. Ancient astronaut theory has been the subject of a recent History Channel series, which has inspired somebody to make a whole film dedicated to debunking it. 

End of Year Plenary

One of the nice things about moving jobs (apart from the promise of free tea at break time) is it gives me a natural break to think a bit more about my subject – about what I teach and why, and whether at some point I should change what I teach at my new school.

If you’re one of my students, you’ll know that we teach Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at AS and A2 to make up our Religious Studies course. These two options are by far the most popular choices for British schools teaching A level Religious Studies. Both of these are interesting topics in their own right, and they are popular with students: from my distant memories of my own younger days, I’d say your teenage years are the time when you start to work out your own answers to some of the big philosophical and ethical questions in life – does God exist, or is the death penalty right or wrong?

However, Philosophy and Ethics aren’t the be all and end all of Religious Studies: actually, to me they are both more like branches of Philosophy than Religious Studies. If you go on to study Religious Studies at degree level, you’ll learn to study religion from a variety of perspectives, and the topics that got me most interested at University – the New Testament, Church history, the sociology of religion – weren’t philosophical or ethical, so unfortunately I don’t get a chance to teach them at school.

It would be nice at some point to play around with what I teach and experiment with something new, but on the other hand, there’s no point in planning a whole course on the secularisation theory or the New Testament if that’s just not what appeals to 16 year olds and nobody ends up taking RS.

So this is your chance to give me a bit of feedback – what have you enjoyed studying, and what haven’t you found so interesting? Would you have been more or less likely to have signed up for an RS A level if we had done something other than Philosophy and Ethics? It’s not easy, but try to think in terms of whether a particular topic raised an interesting set of issues or questions for you rather than whether you think it was or wasn’t taught well: that’s what being bitchy on facebook is for!

And if you’re reading this and teach Religious Studies at University, what would you like to see in your first year undergraduates? Do they need to have a grounding in particular topics, do they need a particular set of skills, or is it more just a case of producing students who have an interest in the field of Religious Studies?