The Ad Whisperer

Crows

Originally uploaded by David Paul Hanson

Totally made up scene. What the heck. I had the elements.

I learned alot of things growing up Lutheran. I learned these things because I was forced to go to Bible School, one week after getting out of regular school. And these things I learned came back to haunt me with a vengeance when I reached the “age of understanding”. Let’s start with a simple one first. “God is love.” Sounds good to me. But oops….go back to the old testament and you learn about a chick that was told not to look at a city that was being smoted (smited?) by God himself, which would be quite hard to not sneak a peek at, and lo and behold, God smote her by way of turning her into a pillar of salt. Now, maybe I’m just not gettin’ it, but if “God is love”, then what is so loving about smiting a chick who just couldn’t resist taking a peek? I mean really. Did He have to turn her into a salt block for disobeying that teeny tiny little bit? Oh, you say, He was making an example of her. Ok, example made. I was terrified to screw up in the tinest way. “God is love”, for me, turned emotionally into, “God loves me as long as I don’t screw up even one teenie tiny little bit.”

Let’s now jump ahead, or is it backwards, to the Ten Commandments. I like the first one the best; “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Now maybe I’m the only one who reads it this way, but I think it says that God is just one of many gods and he knows it, but we only better worship Him and not the others. Ok, call me literal, but I’m just sayin.

“Honor thy father and mother”. My father was a jerk. Ok, I’ll go to hell for that but I mean it. Mean sucker.

Which brings me to heaven and hell itself. How the heck does “God is love” fit into that scheme of things. Oh..I get it. He IS love if you love him back. If we don’t love him back we get, unfortunately, smote and sent to the pit. SInce when does love motivated by fear get anything done with a positive bent?

The next one for today is another one of my favorites; the crucifixion. Now, I do believe Jesus of Nazereth was crucified, which was a common form of execution in those days. but the, to me, ridiculous part is that the “God who is love” needed a blood sacrifice so we can be forgiven for our sins. Huh? Now really. I mean this was at a time when the earth was flat, and the center of the universe. Weather was freaky and not uderstood and the best they could come up with was killing sheep and other critters to appease a pissed off weather god. But really, a God who demands a blood sacrifice? We humans don’t even demand blood for stuff like stealing cars, which by the way, is worse than sneaking a peek at an entire city being smoted. In the Bible’s case, everyone is short of perfect so we deserve to die. Huh? I know I’m not perfect but I haven’t killed anyone, raped or pillaged.

Yes, God is love. But that’s just as long as you pony up. See, this free will thing, the choice He gave us to love him or not, is not really a choice. In other pieces I have called Christianity the Hobson’s Choice of religions. A Hobson’s Choice is no choice at all. Actually I think it’s a very schizophrenic exercise in corporate (meaning the church) control.

And finally; God is love. But he’s also says He is a jealous god. Jealousy is one of our baser emotions. So God is jealous? And He’s love? Huh? I need a nap.

I remember about a year ago when Madonna played at a festival to promote the cause of stopping Gorebal Warming. When she hit the state she yelled into the mic, “If you want to save the earth, I want you to jump up and down.” I felt this was fitting metaphor for the entire movement. So here’s what gets me: For one thing, the earth doesn’t need saving. If we kill ourselves off, the earth will be just fine in about 25,000 years, which, in galactical time, is but a few seconds. And now there is the swine flu pandemic about to reak havoc with the “earth”. I live in Fargo, North Dakota, which recently got international attention because our local river, the Red, overflowed its banks, like it does every year. We have known that the Red River floods almost every year and always has. But, people still build on the thing. And the it floods, again, it’s a crisis of biblical proportions. Indeed, this year the flood was blamed by some local fundamental fruitcakes on our having an abortion clinic in town. God’s wrath. To me it seems odd that God whacked the people living along the river whether they have had or condone abortions or not. Apparently this God does not have a very good aim or is just sort of sloppy in dealing out his smiting. But, I digress.

I can’t help but be opinionated about marketing campaigns that, in my humble opinion, just don’t make the mark. Recently a bank in my town created a large billboard and print campaign with the headline “Bundle Up”. I, as well as anyone else I asked about it, had no clue what that meant. So I went to the website and clicked on the “Bundle Up” icon and out popped up some listed things like “Have teenagers?”. I clicked on that link and the site downloaded a white PDF with a listing of the “products” that I should get if I had teenagers. No incentive, no reason, no benefit. So here we have a case where internal “bank speak” such as “bundling” of products and services leaks out all over the public mass media and confuses everyone as to what the heck it means. I mean really, why in the world would I “buy” a bundle? What’s in it for me. The basics of marketing violated on every billboard. Just plain silly marketing.

The way my Lutheran church instructed me when I was growing up was that because Eve ate an apple, “sin”, like some virus spreading through the population, infected me and I became a “sinner” and deserved to die. To me, this always begged the question of why I deserved to die if we execute killers and the most I had done up to that point was lie to my mom
about where I was on a Friday night. So, I reasoned, the Christian God is
a pretty angry being. Either that or He doesn’t have the ability or
doesn’t care to develop the ability to discern between the severity of “sins” that we humans do.

Ok, fine. I lied to my mom so I deserve to die.This always struck me as rather odd, too, because we all die anyway sooner or later. Every night we die what is called “the little death” when we fall asleep. We go unconscious for about eight hours. And it’s actually a very pleasant thing for most of us to “get rid of ourselves” for awhile. So if we consider death to be just going unconscious forever and ever, it’s really not so bad, since we won’t know it anyway. No pain, no anxiety, no boredem…no nothing.

So I reasoned that the powers that be, (the church) decided they needed to up the anti to keep us in line and devised a way to scare us, namely that we can’t JUST die and go unconscious forever and ever, but that were either going to go to one of only two possible places after we die; eternal bliss or eternal pain. And to top that, it’s not based on “how good” we are, but on what we believe.

Let’s talk about belief. I have a hard time believing anything just because I think I “should” believe in it. Just like we can’t choose who we fall in love with, believing is outside of the control of our wills. You may recall Pascal’s Wager, where he says we can “act” like we believe so if it’s true, we’ll win. But christianity says we MUST believe, not just act like it. It’s a double bind. So it’s a real conundrum, we may WANT to believe, but it’s just not truly possible for everyone, and unfortunatly, those that can’t are gonna be hurtin’ in the long run.

So, do I deserve to die? Perhaps. I will anyway. Will “believing”, based out of fear of pain count and fake God out? Will “believing” make me behave much differently and better than I currently do? Naw. I’m just going to do my best and not hurt anyone else along this journey as best I can. I believe that is the best course of action.

My next post will take a look at “meaning” and why the thought of no afterlife is so terrifying to us.

I travel in professional circles of artists, architects, speaking and acting talent. If there is any common denominator amongst these people, it is a willingness to remain open to spiritual discovery and a respect and even enthusiasm for an honest doubt. In my personal experience, and I believe the world, with its growing fanaticism and killing cultures, might also begin to agree, that, as the old saying goes; an honest doubt is more truthful than blind faith. The next few posts will be addressing some of my honest doubts about the religion I inherited from my childhood. We’ll see where it leads us.

We humans are an odd bunch. We have large brains for making exquisite and logical decisions, yet we make most of them based on our not-so-reliable emotions. We know that there really is only the “now” and no tangible future or past, yet we refuse to live in the present. We eat out of boredom or emotional pain rather than because our bodies signaling us to add fuel. We know what we should do but we rarely do it. We think we’re younger than we are. We can’t imagine people not liking us. We hold our opinions too close to our chests. We tend to think other people see the world the same way we do. We fear death and keep ourselves absorbed in experiences to keep those fears at bay as long as we can. We exist in the eternal present but our egos and bodies  suffer the insults of time and age. We believe in invisible gods born of virgins yet we ridicule those who say they’ve spoken directly with those same gods. Be believe good people will get their same bodies back after death, whether they like their body or not. We believe people who simply don’t believe what we do will suffer eternal pain yet we speak of infinite love of those same gods. We borrow others beliefs in eternal life without question because they comfort us with their wishful thinking. We live and kill by ancient words written on ancient parchment without any evidence of their authorship. We believe too much, yet understand too little. Such is our fate.

Beginning in 2009, our company H2M, a marketing and advertising agency will be implementing a one-year experiment of having no defined vacation or PTO time. The rules are very simple: If you need time off, take it. Now, there are some caveats to this. First off, this is not a “I worked late so I’m coming in tomorrow at noon” sort of thing. This is for time off that is scheduled and approved through their department head. Another thing is that in North Dakota, they are what is termed “exempt employees”, which means we, as their employer, are exempt from paying overtime. In other words, they are professionals paid to do a job. They’ve accepted that role and will work as long as it takes to get the job done.

It’s amazing to me to see how different staffers perceive their jobs. Some clearly have no and take no notice of how long they work. They come in early, work late, are on IM or email on weekends about client issues etc. Then there are those who are more traditionally minded as to having a “job”. They still feel as if their job is from 8 am to 5pm. As an employer, I don’t care as long as the work is of high quality. I’ve always been about quality over quantity. But I’m also human and I do love to see people working all hours, and not because it makes more money for us, but because it’s so clear they love what they do. It’s not a job, it’s somewhere between a career and a calling.

This will be an interesting experiment. I suspect that it will be abused from time to time by the usual suspects. I also suspect there will be a fairly strong peer group pressure exerted on those who attempt to milk it.

Time will tell.