Showing posts with label advertisement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertisement. Show all posts

Wednesday

135 Age of Temptation

They used to say that the hardest words to say in any language were "I'm sorry," and that was certainly true during a time when relationships still played a more significant role in our society, and for a lot of people it may still be so.

But from the increasing incapability I'm observing in my fellowmen to hold or conduct a relationship successfully, or, in many cases to even show a glimpse of interest in having one, I'm beginning to suspect that the hardest words in this new age of Temptation, where the acquisition of possessions, position and diversion seem to play a much superior role than other human beings to deal with, perhaps the hardest words to say right now are: "No, thank you!"

We figure that we have to take anything that life offers us.

After all, coincidence has become our god, along with luck, since our whole existence is based on the theory that we're one lucky shot in an innumerable amount of universes where life happened to find all its necessary ingredients, and so, if luck happens to hand us an opportunity, we tend to grab it without giving the consequences much thought.

Maybe it's different in your part of the world, but that's what I'm observing life to be like for much of the younger generation in Germany at the onset of the 21st century.
Of course, there are always those who seem to be a bit more mature and responsible than the majority of their peers, but I even observe it with some of us more mature ones, who ought to know better:

There seems to be that in-built mechanism in us that makes us tend to accept a tempting offer, rather than to decline, even if whatever it is we're getting to enjoy may not all be that good for us in the long run, or the nature of the opportunity may turn out to be questionable.

Prudence has gone down the drain in this, our age, in which a large deal of our supposed enlightenment consists of advertisement. After all, you must be enlightened if you can come up with such sophisticated commercials full of high-tech trickery worth millions of dollars, as we do, just in order to sell other people our goods!

Well, I've already shared my thoughts on the difference between advertisement and genuine enlightenment, I think.

But it always seem to get back around to it.

We're being offered so many things from so many different sides, we just about accept it our god-given duty to accept at least some of them.


That probably shows one difference in strategies between the original advertizer and the Guy he's trying to imitate: the Original Creator. While God's slogan is, "Quality, not quantity" (as in "many are called, but the chosen are few,") His opponent goes by the opposite credo. He figures the more garbage he can dish out, the more of it we're bound to swallow, ruining our taste for quality and rendering whatever discernment we once might have had for what's the real thing and another cheap fake useless once and for all.

That's because he's getting ready to present us with the ultimate temptation of all, the greatest fake of all times, his plastic utopia and wonderful new world order, including its new, cashless economic order that all the bigshots are crying for right now, with himself at the top, and a system definitely too perfect to be real, and from the looks of it, a lot of people are going to fall for it the way Eve did when he pulled his first stunt 6000 years ago...

We may not have evolved, but adverisement and propaganda have, and all for a good reason. We're all being prepared for the hour of temptation, "which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth" (Revelation 3:10), and blessed will be those who have learned to say these hardest of all words, "No, thank you!"

Monday

115 The Genesis of Advertisement

My mind still keeps rattling on the theme of my last thoughts on the "beginnings of advertisement" that I stumbled across via Yin & Yang (even though I should actually get to work...)

The first product ever advertised in history was, basically, evil.

It sort of reminds you of the scene in "Time Bandits" where the bandits arrive at the Castle of Perpetual Darkness and its evil tenant puts on this show and offers them "the most fabulous object in the world..." and they all wind up trapped in a cage hanging from the ceiling and swinging above everlasting darkness...

Isn't that what advertisement is? You're being offered something you didn't know you ever needed or wanted, but advertisement paints it so pretty that you simply can't resist it.

Well, that's what Satan did to Eve when he advertised the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil (adding the ingredient of evil to an already existing world in which all was good, thus creating the Yin/Yang system of duality I expounded on earlier...): nobody needed it. Nobody knew how much they were going to regret buying that crap. Nobody knew what it was supposed to be good for, but they did it anyway, just in order to have it.

Sounds just like any old regular afternoon at the mall...

No wonder I never liked advertisement. It has all the qualities of the first hoax in history that resulted in every catastrophe that ever happened since... Clothes. Lies. Murder... the shebang.

The difference between Satan's products and God's is that God doesn't need any advertisement for His:

Everybody knows you only get good stuff from Him. And best of all, it's always free, no strings attached.

Nobody ever asked for a re-reimbursement for the air they just inhaled because it wasn't their favorite flavor.

You get hungry and you eat the food that comes to your fridge via good ol' mother earth.

(Did you ever realize that with all the fancy stuff man created, they haven't managed to successfully reproduce food synthetically, I mean, starting from scratch with no ingredients from the Maker? After all, you can't eat plastic yet, and even that is based on a natural resource...)

So, next time you feel that urge to bust your credit card due to some 256 commercials you just watched while ironing your shirts: think again!

Or before you allow your kids' lives to become a non-stop repetition of the darkest hour of the Garden of Eden!

The Bible has something to say about greed: "Let your conversation be without covetousness and be content with such things as ye have" (Heb.13:5).

If Adam and Eve had known that, they would have saved themselves - and us - millennia worth of trouble.

The secret is just being happy with what we have, instead of ever craving what the Jones' have got.

Especially in the light of the fact that 10.000 people still starve each and every day because they haven't got anything, not even the barest of necessities...

So much on the beginnings of consumerism. It seemed good enough at first, but the end of it was wailing and gnashing of teeth that we haven't seen and heard the end of yet...

And if you really want to be happy, why not try to make somebody else happy and make a donation instead of buying yet another item you don't really need? Let's get back to the Garden!