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Every morning, when it isn’t cloudy, I’ve got a pretty good view of sunrise out my windows. I don’t pull down the shades, so the light wakes me up. It all happens so slow, so effortless and it reminds me that very little that I’m worried about actually matters. I love that God stops our progress, makes our physical bodies go into a temporary coma, then wakes us up again so we can get a little more work done. I used to have a ferret that ran around my room (and when he got out, the house) for about thirty minutes, only to suddenly collapse into sleep for an hour, and repeated this cycle all day. I always thought he was funny, but really, we humans do the same thing, we just have longer cycles. I like that God made everybody speak different languages at the tower of Babel. It was as if He didn’t want human progress to move too fast, because human progress was bad for humans. I wonder if I worked all the time, without sleep, what stupid thing I would create, what stupid thingthat might make me feel like I could somehow be like God. In [...]

This entry is Part 3 in a series called Commercialism and Faith. The series aims to make us more aware of why we think the way we think and behave the way we behave, giving us a perspective from which we can live a more enlightened life, free of the trappings of consumer addiction. In my last entry, I mentioned that this next entry would be about Christ as a product. But I thought I’d cover ritual first. I’ll be getting to Christ as a product soon. I want to focus for a moment on rituals and how both religious people and marketers play on the human need for ritual in order to bring security and comfort. In his breakthrough book Buyology, Martin Lindstrom talks about how marketers package their products within rituals, even going so far as to create rituals within which their products can be used. He notes there is no cultural tradition that would have us put a lime in a bottle of Corona, for instance, and how that ritual came about when a marketer placed a bet with a friend at a bar that he could make the masses put a lime in a bottle of [...]

This is the first post in a series called Commercialism and Faith, in which I will explore the relationship between the language of our culture (commercialism) and how we view and relate to God. This series is not a knock against commercialism as much as it is an exploration of the effects of the cultural language on how we think about the world and specifically how we think about God. Commercials are simply an exchange of information about the availability of products and services. The idea of a commercial is, in my opinion, morally neutral. That said, I think you will be surprised at how much your thinking, and even your emotional well-being, is affected by advertising. The average American encounters 3000 commercial messages each day. Whether this is a radio commercial, a magazine ad, a logo on the side of a coffee cup or a billboard we pass on the highway, these images and messages are designed to cause to you think of your life as incomplete, and desire the product they are selling to make your life complete again. A standard formula used in many commercials is twofold: 1. To illicit a thought in the viewer that theirlife is not satisfactory and then 2. To convince the viewer their life could [...]