Sunday 19 February 2012

Advertising, Pilate and Arrogance


First and foremost, I want to rant about how much information is actually accessible about us. I was on YouTube just a few hours ago and noticed an advert box on the side trying to get me to buy comic book related TV shows such as Spiderman and Avengers. On closer look this box reveals that it knows I recently bought the X-Men cartoon from play.com.

This is really concerning. How has YouTube got hold of this information? Or more importantly how has an external company got hold of this information and then passed it on to YouTube to get me to click?
I’m just saying this is really not right?
Secondly...

 I was watching Family Guy again the other day and noticed a sketch where Pontius Pilate and Judas meet and celebrate because they both want to ‘crucify the son of God’, then they march off merrily arm in arm.


 
(Sorry about subtitles, this is the only version from youtube I could find)


Now I’m all for Religion not being taken too seriously on these programmes but only if the facts are right. Don’t take the mick out of something based on false information, this becomes annoying and misleading.

It is clearly stated in the Bible that Pontius Pilate believes Jesus to be innocent of any crimes, and only goes through with the trail because the public are close to rioting. He washes his hands in that symbolic scene.

So to depict Pilate as wanting to execute Jesus is just wrong.

This feeds in nicely to what I originally planned to talk about. I really cannot stand it when people make assumptions about situations based on how they expect it to have gone. By this I mean they guess a certain event took place a certain way and then as far as they are concerned that is set in stone. This really annoys me.

Example: A guy and a female friend go out for a drink, something happens and the girl gets spiked and therefore really ill. Guy takes girl back to his apartment so he can watch her and make sure she makes it through the night. In these circumstances the best place to put the girl is in the bed, it is most comfortable and easiest place to lay someone on their side. Next morning the Girlfriend of the guy arrives and see’s the girl in his bed. Bam.

She immediately assumes that the guy cheated on her. The guy protests and tells exactly what happens but the girl does not believe. She assumes that her view of the situation is right and that the guy must automatically be lying and covering up.

Reality check here people. Things are hardly ever what they appear at first glance. So many bizarre things happen in the world that make things look suspicious, but we have to remember that every scenario has a number of different possible paths leading to it. Humans have this irritating habit of assuming the worst or the one that fits most in worldview and then regarding anything other to their view as an excuse or a lie.

This arrogance is one of the few things to truly make me angry. I guess the moral of this is don’t just assume the most likely circumstances are the true ones, but its only ‘likely’ by your world view and not in reality. Having said this, a situation like that does require care as obviously people do lie about situations to get themselves out of trouble. So the key here is don’t just assume but try and find out all of the facts and evidence before you start getting arrogant and throw around accusations.

2 comments:

  1. Well websites can access your cookies which contain search terms that you use frequently etc, websites write to these cookies, they're not really considered to hold sensitive information, and they're easy to clear yourself. Also the company never sees this, it's all in automated databases.

    And with regards to Family Guy portraying something incorrectly, how many writers really go to the effort to research something before writing about it?

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  2. Well very true, which I feel is bad practise really, I would never dream of doing a programme on something without researching it first, especially with senstive subjects such as Religion.

    Hmm what else can computers do... the government is tracking us maaaaaan, we need to get off the machine! Join the revolution!! x

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