This weekend we had sky-writing (more on that another time), showing that the church funds scammeddonated for this purpose are certainly not helping anyone in need.* Wonder how many people could have been fed, watered, clothed or vaccinated? The dollars involved in sky-writing make my contributions to (genuine and secular) charities e.g. Oxfam, Fred Hollows foundation etc (By all means go donate too!) look trivial. I wonder if instead of spending money fixing people’s eyes Fred Hollows would prefer the dollars collected to go to writing up “Fred Hollows = vision” in sky writing.

I’d wonder why God can’t just settle this once and for all without the need for hiring planes to do what an almighty all powerful being could do with the snap of the fingers. Pull that burning bush out of storage and wave it around the sky if nothing else.

Jesus couldn't just do this himself? Or at least turn the wind down a bit, because it was gone in a matter of minutes.

*Unless your need was to have the sky drawn on for the briefest of moments before the wind blew it away.

The goal of the campaign was to encourage discussion on a mythical figure that has most certainly been discussed ad nauseam for, oh, about two thousand years or so with no conclusive results and no evidence forthcoming to back up the wild supernatural claims. Certainly no need for millions of dollars to be spent on the hope of converting some “cynical Sydney-siders”.

Jesus isn’t about life

I’d have to question whether the campaign knows anything about Jesus. Saying Jesus was all about life is kinda silly when the whole Jesus concept is “God creates son to be sacrificed so that said god will be able to forgive mankind for various accumulated sins”.

The Jesus mythology is pretty clear that the whole point is blood sacrifice (e.g. DEATH): without the end of crucifixion there is no life-death-rebirth type mythology. Sure you can gloss over this and claim that he died for humanity to live, but it’s some pretty spectacular doublespeak to get to “all about life” from “all about death”.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the symbol of Christianity a tortured guy nailed to a cross?

Jesus: all about death. Nailed it!

Doesn’t look like much of a life eh?

Childish (and child targetting) posters making ridiculous claims

Check out some of the posters here (warning 3.2 meg PDF): here.

Let’s look at the claimed creation of a giant chair.

Chairs made by Jesus?

The poster thanks Jesus for it. Hmm.. Funny, because I found this little picture that shows a bunch of PEOPLE making this.

The real creators of the giant chairs

Funny, I don’t see Jesus in there or maybe he’s running the crane.

The real creator is Giancarlo Neri and the piece is called “The Writer”. Of the things claimed as inspiration I didn’t read anything about Jesus either (see here for a PDF archive of a tonne of articles on the work). There’s no mention of the word Jesus and one reference to “my god it’s vast”.
From an article on it:

Neri calls the design a “monument to the loneliness of writing” but says he hopes people in London will make of it what they will.

No dedication to Jesus there. But I guess the Bible Society made an ad of it to promote their religion without any basis. *shrug*

Another “bizarre” one mentioned in a newspaper article thanks jesus for hot chips: have these people never been into the local fish and chips shop? It sure as shit isn’t Jesus accumulating oil burns over the deep fry vats.

Then there’s one claiming Jesus created parrots (I’m a little fuzzy, but I don’t remember any mention of Jesus being around until long after genesis).

Poor evolution gets screwed again. This time outside the USA for a change.

So can just anyone claim natural processes as their own without a shred of scientific basis? I’d like to claim rights to the natural process of cow digestion so that I can claim royalties every time the churches put out future religious bullshit. Since my taxes are subsidising this sort of rubbish, it’s only fair I get my cut.

Then there’s the one I really think crosses (boom-tish) a line  (or two) that shouldn’t be in a public place directed at children. The R.I.P. cartoon one. Here it is:

Some disclaimers missing from this. Oh, and evidence.

Clearly aimed at children (or those of a childish mind I guess) and I think a pretty clear violation of the relevant advertising/marketing code for Children.

Firstly: there’s absolutely zero proof that there’s an afterlife. None. Zip. Zero. If this was a medical product making claims about care it’d need disclaimers and hard evidence.

Secondly: Substitute anyone’s name in there and it would have equal proof. If Christianity can claim it with no proof, why not (other) corporations?

Ronald McDonald looking after the dead. Just as much proof and just as misleading.

Muslims could run an identical ad thanking Allah or Mohammed for looking after their dead mother. Scientology could thank Xenu or thetan alien spirits whatever it is they believe in.

But perhaps more accurate would be the following (which falls within the findings of effectiveness of prayer studies e.g. like this one showing prayer not only doesn’t aid recovery, actually made recovery statistics worse):

Proof that praying really doesn't work that well.

Or perhaps if they’re going to claim parrots and other man made or biological things as the realm of things to thank Jesus for:

Also fair to say huh? Thanks Jesus for cancer, AIDS, pig flu, poor eyesight, birth defects etc.

Of course I’m forgetting the golden rules of this “God” concept which is:

• responsible for all good, even if you did it yourself
• testing your faith or a deserved punishment if bad stuff happens

Anyhow, I lodged a complaint with the advertising standards bureau because I think these ads breach a number of the standards on advertising for children. We’ll see how that goes. If making any and all unfounded claims to promote the Jesus corporation is fine with them then what’s to stop other businesses from doing so (assuming Religion doesn’t magically deserve an exemption to the rules about deceptive advertising and misleading children targeted information).

If you’re going to productise Jesus then just like other product advertisement you can’t make unfounded claims. Keep it nicely contained in that little book of fairy-tales and it isn’t as much of an issue.

Other links:

• Jesus about life (parody site as the idiots forgot to register the .com)
• The official site is here

Oh and here’s another one:

and a cutesy cartoon one explaining the “science”:

More science:

Scary thing is that there are a tonne of serious ones from the coal industry making grandiose claims about technology that simply does not exist.

Disclosure requirements

I think this idea raises some important questions about the need for journalistic standards among bloggers. Disclosure of payment for mentions/reviews etc is very important from an ethical standpoint and to avoid destroying reader confidence in the blogger.

I remember being approached a few years back to promote an enterprise software product by the marketing firm (“we have a small budget to spend on marketing, so we’re looking at blogging to promote our product”). I politely refused because I knew nothing about it and would be polluting the things I wanted to talk about with ad postings indistinguishable from the normal content. Something akin to a technique I’ve noticed on sporting and radio broadcasts where the hosts of the program segue headlong into pimping a product.

So if someone was going to go down the path of pay per post: they’d better clearly disclose that that’s what they’re doing.  Otherwise they’re burning credibility for dollars.

The spam equivalence

People don’t want to be tricked into receiving ad content for the same reason they dislike spam. Spam is advertising trying to sneak into your brain via donning the clothing of meaningful content in your inbox for those people too silly to get a gmail address. One could argue that all advertising is this really, but the majority of advertising is forced to play by the rules: ads on tv are generally fairly easy to separate from shows, ads in magazines are forced to be different enough from content (e.g. the pretend article ones have a notice along the top) and web ads are generally any element on the page that’s macromedia flash animations of monkeys or anything poker related.

Polluting the social networking sphere is most definitely on the minds of advertisers. When the pollution is done through content creators themselves (rather than banner ads) they know very well that it becomes harder to tune out. So to be fair to readers/viewers the best idea would be to ensure that a blurring of the normal and advertising content does not occur.

The TV show in question: review

Now onto “Lie to me” the TV show. Disclaimer: I didn’t receive payment for this blog although I’d very much like to.

It’s produced by Fox to round out their offerings with a fictional show about lies. This is to go nicely with that prick Bill O’Reilly’s show (which if you haven’t seen it is pretty much non stop lies and bullshit insane bullying but thankfully occasionally cops a spanking).

I think it’s an interesting show, good set of actors and original spin on the “detective” genre. Unlike other attempts at “incredibly insightful detective” series this one doesn’t stoop immediately to “complete and utter bullshit” like say ones involving psychic powers, number crunching, talking to ghosts etc etc and appears based on something real from law enforcement.

The story is based around a lead guy (Tim Roth as Dr Cal Lightman) who is a world famous facial and body expressions/microexpression reading ninja who naturally trained deep in the jungles of Indonesia/deserts of Morocco before some sort of colossal cock up resulting in his fall from grace at a government agency (allowing him to start a very expensive consultancy firm doing more of the readings that presumably lead to the big mess in the first place). These microexpressions are involuntary movements of various muscles in the face or other body language. Think a cheese lite version of David coruso (sans sunglasses) meets House with a tiny dash of Californication (the ever so mature father daughter relationship).

Some things they do well in the series so far:

• They pour scorn on lie detectors which appear useless
• they emphasise the notion that different people have different types of cues to pick up on for lies
• they show off some technology to do voice stress analysis (from my experience: insurance companies are starting to integrate this into their call centres)
• they’ve obviously spent a lot of time getting the actors to work on their expressions
• Not too much “Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46″ video gimmickry (bonus points for anyone who knows where that is from?)

On the idea of microexpressions, try a test here to see how you go: http://www.cio.com/article/facial-expressions-test. There’s something similar that pops up in the series in the first or second episode. There’s a healthy spattering of footage of politicians and celebrities lying (according to the microexpressions anyhow). I’ve watched a documentary on these microexpressions in the past (again picking on politicians: in particular Bill Clinton) and it seemed consistant with what I remember of that.

Anyhow, it’s a series I’ll watch more of and I didn’t get paid to say anything good about it. Although if anyone wants to send me money now that I’ve plugged the show, by all means.