Who the **** is Alice?

I was always a fan of rock legend Alice Cooper in my youth and felt confused and even threatened when I heard certain Christians calling for him and his music to be banned due to the dark and "subversive" influence that it allegedly wielded.

It was reassuring then when I discovered recently that Alice himself is a Christian. I think it demonstrates that we can sometimes be over-sensitive about some of these things, after all his act was only ever theatre. Take a close look at the values this man cherishes and the lifestyle he leads and you could only conclude that he is a force for good.

Watch this fascinating video and see what you think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oim4OWMANZ4

Techno Joe?

I've been asked by my Church to manage it's web presence and its new Facebook and Twitter accounts. In the land of the blind, and all that...

Sorry it's been so long

Well I guess the down side of working to pay a debt is that one doesn't find the time to do other things. Like maintain a blog!

But Holy Joe is back now and raring to go.

A big thank you to those who have been visiting for updates, I'll try now to make up for lost time.

Ask and it shall be given unto you

When I wrote this item I was at my absolute lowest ebb. I was actually raging at God, imploring him, if I had done something wrong, to punish me and not my son. Nothing was going right for me and I felt abandoned, even by the Saviour.

Yesterday, out of the blue, I received the news that my son would be given a bursary. Better still, that his school would give me ample time to pay off what I owe this year. Although I will still struggle for a while, a massive weight has suddenly been lifted from my shoulders.

I don't think God's plan involves just awarding material wealth to anybody who asks for it. I can't see how that would benefit society, not to mention the precedent it would set. But there are occasions and circumstances in which he hears the cry. And my immediate thought now is to repay him by not being so sulky, or irritable with my family, friends and others in the community, and by reacting to the fact that I am under less pressure by increasing my physical and spiritual commitment to my Church.

First I gave thanks, now I recognise I have a duty. I guess that's the way it works.

The science of Christianity

I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a good friend who considers himself to be a "scientific Marxist".

Being both scientific and a Marxist he does not believe in the existence of God, and gives me an impression of being quite disappointed that I do. However much I disagree with his views (although I have nothing per se against either scientists or Marxists), I would concede that he is very much an intellectual.

To a certain extent any attempt to counter cold science with faith, or for that matter vice versa, is fairly pointless. The two exist upon different planes. If the metaphysical could be explained by reference to a mathematical formula then it would no longer be metaphysics, and similarly God's power exists outside of scientific comprehension.

As I have stated elsewhere on this blog, infinity and eternity are two concepts that science has not been able to satisfactorily explain. Oddly my friend disagreed with this, but the evidence he used to support his case either went clean over my head or, as I believe to be the case, was not really evidence at all.

A preacher who used to visit my Church once told me about a friend he had, who was a surgeon. A man to whom, in other words, a thorough grasp of science was an imperative. The preacher relayed to me how the surgeon had marvelled at the complexity and precision of the human body, and concluded that only a divine creator could have devised such a thing.

Perhaps that's why even Darwin, having (we are told) debunked the creationist theory, never went so far as to describe himself as an atheist. My Marxist friend protested that this was only because his own (Darwin's) wife had been a Christian.

Not a very scientific argument, I thought.

We all need friends

Over the past few days I've been making some wonderful new friends on Facebook.

I say wonderful, I've never actually met any of them and I can't really say with any certainty that are all, truly wonderful. But friendship is a wonderful thing and it is nice share greetings, stories and interests even with complete strangers, especially when we are united through faith.

I hope some of my new Facebook friends will drop by here from time to time, leave comments or even submit articles (e-mail to holyjoe@live.co.uk please).

This blog is your resource, every time you leave a comment or write a piece it goes up in the search engines and more people will visit.

Please help me to build this resource and spread the Word.

On Rage and Temptation

It is easy to praise God when everything is going well in one's life. The test is to hold on to one's faith when nothing seems to be going right.

My kid attends public school. His fees are £11.5k every year. That doesn't mean I have a lot of money, in fact I don't have any money. I send him there because he suffers badly from anxiety. It is a small school and the teachers there really look after him. He wouldn't cope at a larger establishment.

My (part-time) "day job" doesn't bring in anything close to enough to keep him there. I am trying to make a living via the Internet, sometimes working up to 20 hours each day (yes, that's on top of the day job!). I have set up an honest business, writing for and promoting my customers' businesses online. I send them business and make them money that I am not getting myself. At least somebody is happy.

Everything that can go wrong invariably does, every obstacle that could conceivably be thrown in the way is always to be found lying there before me. If I am down to my last penny the car will break down and need £100 spent on it, or something such.

I am not a lazy man nor a scrounger. I am prepared to work incredibly hard for a modest return if it will keep my son at school. He is doing really, really well - coming top or near to the top of a very competitive class in every subject he takes. He doesn't want to leave. It will destroy him (and me) if he has to.

Last Sunday my Pastor gave a sermon about the Temptation of Christ. Satan offered him the world in exchange for his soul (Christ that is, not my Pastor). In my bitterness I found myself thinking "well, at least he was given the choice"!

This morning, after encountering yet another obstacle not in any way of my making, I find myself raging. Raging against God, raging against Christ. I seriously find myself praying for death (I am very well insured).

And yet my fury has produced more work than I have done for many a day, and it is still only 8.20 in the morning.

But what spurs me on is that, even in my screaming anger, my faith remains strong. When I curse God I find myself ruing my fury, apologising. Even now I know he will help me.

Sometimes it take adversity to reassure us. At least I have my faith, many have none. I wouldn't change that for all the world - even if by some miracle I were ever to be offered the choice!

Evangelism or Example?

Despite being a dedicated Christian I've never really been a shouting at people in the street kind of guy.

In point of fact, Christian or no Christian I am every bit as put off by street-corner evangelists as any non-Christian ever was. "Have you found Jesus?" they ask, almost invariably when I am late for work or some other important function, or when the shop I am running to get to is just about to close.

"Unfortunately I seem to have found you," I think to myself.

Why do they always pick on me?

I'm being a bit unfair. These guys don't receive any material reward for trying to save my soul (there's always an assumption that I am not a Christian already). They are doing it for what they perceive to be my spiritual well-being. Mindful of this I try to bring the conversation to a close with a warm smile, but it's difficult when they won't take no for an answer and insist upon following you into the bank.

Of course, as Christians, we have an obligation to try to help others to see the light. I remain doubtful as to quite how this is achieved by haranguing passers-by in the high street. But at least they are trying to do something. What exactly am I doing to help spread the Good News?

Wel apart from this humble blog and the few leaflets that I push through letterboxes in my local community at Christmas, I would like to think the answer is in setting an example. I have many friends who are non-Christians, and it is my hope that the values I try to adhere to (please notice I said "try", I detest moralising and any kind of assumption of superiority) are noticed by others, and that any positive impression formed of my attitude and lifestyle will translate into a positive impression of the Church I attend and of the Faith I observe.

My belief is that each of us needs to approach the challenge of spreading the Word by recognising what we do best and playing to our own strengths. "Let a hundred flowers bloom" as Mao Zedong put it. But then again, he was an athiest.

Why does God allow natural disasters?

Acknowledgements to David Bain writing in BBC News Magazine.


Evil has always been a thorn in the side of those - of whatever faith - who believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God.

As the philosopher David Hume (echoing Epicurus) put it in 1776: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

Faced with this question, Archbishop of York John Sentamu said he had "nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while another clergyman, Canon Giles Fraser, preferred to respond "not with clever argument but with prayer".

Perhaps their stance is understandable. The Old Testament is also not clear to the layman on such matters. When Job complains about the injuries God has allowed him to suffer, and claims "they are tricked that trusted", God says nothing to rebut the charges.

Less reticent is the American evangelist Pat Robertson. He has suggested Haiti has been cursed ever since the population swore a pact with the Devil to gain their freedom from the French at the beginning of the 19th Century. Robertson's claim will strike many as ludicrous, if not offensive.

And even were it true, it wouldn't obviously meet the challenge.

Why would a loving deity allow such a pact to seem necessary? Why wouldn't he have freed the Haitians from slavery himself, or prevented them from being enslaved in the first place? And why, in particular, would he punish today's Haitians for something their forbears putatively did more than two centuries before?

So what should believers say? To make progress, we might distinguish two kinds of evil?:

• the awful things people do, such as murder, and
• the awful things that just happen, such as earthquakes

St Augustine, author CS Lewis and others have argued God allows our bad actions since preventing them would undermine our free will, the value of which outweighs its ill effects.

But there's a counter-argument. Thoroughly good people aren't robots, so why couldn't God have created only people like them, people who quite freely live good lives?

However that debate turns out, it's quite unclear how free will is supposed to explain the other kind of evil - the death and suffering of the victims of natural disasters.

Perhaps it would if all the victims - even the newborn - were so bad that they deserved their agonising deaths, but it's impossible to believe that is the case.

Or perhaps free will would be relevant if human negligence always played a role. There will be some who say the scale of the tragedy in natural disasters is partly attributable to humans. The world has the choice to help its poorer parts build earthquake-resistant structures and tsunami warning systems.

But the technology has not always existed. Was prehistoric man, with his sticks and stones, somehow negligent in failing to build early warning systems for the tsunamis that were as deadly back then as they are today?

The second century saint, Irenaeus, and the 20th Century philosopher, John Hick, appeal instead to what is sometimes called soul-making. God created a universe in which disasters occur, they think, because goodness only develops in response to people's suffering.

To appreciate this idea, try to imagine a world containing people, but literally no suffering. Call it the Magical World. In that world, there are no earthquakes or tsunamis, or none that cause suffering. If people are hit by falling masonry, it somehow bounces off harmlessly. If I steal your money, God replaces it. If I try to hurt you, I fail.

So why didn't God create the Magical World instead of ours? Because, the soul-making view says, its denizens wouldn't be - couldn't be - truly good people.

It's not that they would all be bad. It's that they couldn't be properly good. For goodness develops only where it's needed, the idea goes, and it's not needed in the Magical World.

In that world, after all, there is no danger that requires people to be brave, so there would be no bravery. That world contains no one who needs comfort or kindness or sympathy, so none would be given. It's a world without moral goodness, which is why God created ours instead.

But there is wiggle room.

Even in a world where nothing bad happens, couldn't there be brave people - albeit without the opportunity to show it? So moral goodness could exist even if it were never actually needed.

And, anyway, suppose we agree moral goodness could indeed develop only in a world of suffering.

Doesn't our world contain a surplus of suffering? People do truly awful things to each other. Isn't the suffering they create enough for soul-making? Did God really need to throw in earthquakes and tsunamis as well?

Suffering's distribution, not just its amount, can also cause problems. A central point of philosopher Immanuel Kant's was that we mustn't exploit people - we mustn't use them as mere means to our ends. But it can seem that on the soul-making view God does precisely this. He inflicts horrible deaths on innocent earthquake victims so that the rest of us can be morally benefitted.

That hardly seems fair.

It's OK, some will insist, because God works in mysterious ways. But mightn't someone defend a belief in fairies by telling us they do too? Others say their talk of God is supposed to acknowledge not the existence of some all-powerful and all-good agent, who created and intervenes in the universe, but rather something more difficult to articulate - a thread of meaning or value running through the world, or perhaps something ineffable.

But, as for those who believe in an all-good, all-powerful agent-God, we've seen that they face a question that remains pressing after all these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by the horrors in Haiti. If a deity exists, why didn't he prevent this?

Taking it all literally

My local Church minister gave an interesting sermon last week.

I like his sermons. He has a very analytical mind and he likes to get behind the scriptures and try to drill into how they came to be written and what they are supposed to say to us.

For me being a Christian is about accepting what Jesus was/is. The Son of God. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This is fundamental, it is what separates the divinity from a mere (deceased) mortal who was but a prophet and an all round good bloke.

The Bible is the Word of God, but written by human hands. If a reference is made in a Book of the Old Testament to an angel wearing a blue hat, is it necessary for me to believe or accept that the angel must have been wearing a blue hat? Does my Faith crumble about my feet if scientific research later establishes that he/she (what gender are angels?) was in fact wearing a red hat?

This is what concerns me about fundamentalism. The defiant refusal to accept that anything written in the Holy Book could be in any way allegorical, exaggerated, misunderstood, misinterpreted (through several literal interpretations) or just plain wrong renders it much more difficult for us to make the simple case for Christianity - that Christ was as one with God, was without sin, died for us, rose from the dead and is alive in us today. All, as it happens, beliefs that science has never been able to successfully refute!

It is an observation worth making that the Gospels do, in places, appear to contradict one another. Where they do it is difficult to conclude that both or all the conflicting stories are correct. And yet it is their differences which give them their strength and make their underlying message more ultimately believable. Here are four uncollaborated accounts of the life of Jesus, wholly different in time and emphasis, which all come together on the fundamental message.

When one considers what unites the Gospels, you won't find me arguing too much about the colour of an angel's hat.