The Passion of the Playstation
Sony has been forced to withdraw a series of ads in Italy which celebrate the Playstation’s 10-year anniversary. The ads, which ran in newspapers and print magazines, depict a smirking young man wearing a crown of thorns made up of the PS’s iconic buttons, and bear the slogan “Ten years of passion”.
Antionio Sciortino, editor of the Italian Christian Family, delved into the bag of cliches for offended Christians and came out with,
This time they have really gone too far […] if this had concerned Islam there would have been a really strong reaction.
Class.
(Thanks again to Andrew Nixon)
[Quietly Titters]
Aww didums – did da nasty advertising man offend you with his horrid advert. There, there. Let me reach for the lawyer and make it all better.
That is a brilliant advert.
Especially since it’s in Italy.
I agree it should be banned. Unfortunately the Church can’t copyright their own brand images. Why should Sony use them to flog their stupid games and undermine strong icons. Allow this advert and you end up with people looking at crucifux and instead of thinking about the afterlife think about Burger king or whatever
Well if they look at a crucifix and thing of Burger King instead of the afterlife, at least they’ll be thinking of something that actually exists.
Surely, Mr Benson, a burger king burger is a kind of afterlife for a cow, as it lives on in our tastebuds (well, not mine, i wouldn’t be seen dead there) and in our stomachs, mingling with the gut bacteria and becoming part of the eater.
You never know what these places put in their meat tom!
“I agree it should be banned. Unfortunately the Church ”
I wish the church would be banned…. Or at least stopped from trying to censor others…
Like I keep saying, the Romans had some good ideas of how to use lions; but any large cat would do the job.
Marc,
er…actually, the Romans didn’t do that. The old story of Christians vs. Lions was just church propaganda. It’s amazing what you can learn when you watch QI 🙂
The biggest mistake the Romans made was to persecute the early christians in far more mundane ways. If they’d just ignored them, and actually done some bloody technological development rather than imbibing vast quantities of lead and concentrating on political in-fighting & civil wars, then the old empire might have outlived that particular brand of supernaturalism.
QI make a lot of mistakes, but I expect you’re right on that one. One recently was, “How many moons are does Earth have” To which Alan replies correctly, “1.”
“No… there are 2.”
etc.
The extra moon “Cruithne” isn’t actually a moon at all, it’s an asteroid and it isn’t in a shared gravitational lock with Earth.
They made a similar mistake with Pluto – which every accepts is a planet, even though some scientists think it should actually be classified differently. I don’t recall why, precisely. QI relied on the recent debacle claiming that Pluto isn’t a planet after all.
Even if Christianity hadn’t evolved the way it did, we’d still have some supersitious nonsense running the world; and without Darwin, I expect we’d be in a lot more trouble than we are now.
(Probably off-topic, sorry).
“I don’t recall why, precisely”
This is partly bad science reporting in the media (no suprise there, then). There are probably 10s of thousands of objects about the same size as Pluto orbiting the Sun in either the Edgeworth-Kuiper belts or Oort clouds. One or two scientists said that it was therefore unclear whether Pluto was any different in terms of size/composition with any of the other planetesimals, which then got conflated by the media to mean ‘astronomers claim that pluto is not a planet’. Which was not, in fact, true at all. Pluto is important enough historically to ensure it’s continued classification as a planet – something that the IAU have been at pains to point out.
Off topic, sure, but illuminating (I can’t speak for others, here only myself, of course.)
Next thing we’ll have QI telling us that we’re living in a binary system because someone saw a reflection of the sun in a bathroom mirror. 😉
This is precisely how bad science gets into the public conscience and we end up with a situation like the one in America where its reported that 50% (approx.) of people still believe in biblical creation!
You’ll note that’s the *Christian* account of how we got here – not some other faith’s. As for a scientific explanation… that’s almost laughed at; even though it can be demonstrated beyond any acceptable level of doubt. Something that I find quite worrying. Especially when the most powerful man in the world (claims) to get personal messages from his god…
Folks, we’re in deep shit.