Main Content

Asking about Jesus

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-04-20 20:55:15 - Graham Ellis

When you attend a good training course, you'll be asking pertinent extra questions - interacting - to make the very best of your time with the tutor. But inevitably on a subject as big as open source programming, you'll come up with other good questions after the course, either soon after ... or long after as you gain experience. And so I go out of my way to make myself available to answer questions later. I can be emailed (perhaps the most common way people ask), you can post onto our "ask the tutor forum" - actually the least used method these days - or you can click on the "ask the tutor" link on our pages.

Who / what will I answer? I have far more time for our delegates than for people who aren't our customers. I have far more time for people who are polite than those who demand an answer. And I have far more time for those who ask clear and logical questions that those who are fuzzy. But even a rude, unclear question from someone I don't know will get at least a short answer (to their first question anyway) - after all if they have taken the time to get in touch, the least I can do is to quickly point them in the right direction.

Some questions, though, provoke thought and take me completely by surprise. This landed in my mailbox today:

via page - /mouth/1309_Dates-for-Easter-2008-to-2015.html
Why do you look like Jesus?

Well - there's a picture of me alongside this article - thank to Tim Chinnick, the photographer, for his permission to use it. (See early April blog). And the first question I ask is "How do you know that there's a resemblance to Jesus here? Do we actually have any photographs of Jesus?"

Now - let's assume that I DO look a bit like Jesus for a second. Does there have to be a reason? An answer to the question "why"? Could it simply be something of a coincicence that there's a similarity?

I can't turn around and answer the question "I model my look on Jesus because ..." because I don't. I don't model my looks on anyone. Not Jesus, not Bob Geldorf, not Hugh Grant ... nor Eddie the Eagle, Charlotte Church or Shrek, come to mention it. So - why do I look like Jesus? If I do look like Jesus, the reason is that it's just a co-incidence.