According to a news article the past couple of days (the story is below), Sony just pulled an ad campaign that featured an image of Jesus after considerable outcry from Christian, from Catholics in particular.


Not that we should necessarily be surprised that people would try to reduce Christ to being just a nice guy with some nice teachings. We do far too much of that ourselves, then we claim to follow the one we've reduced to that same caricature. Are others seeing Christ's power and holiness reflected in everything we do? Or do they come away from interactions with us thinking that Jesus is no big deal? I think C.S. Lewis put it pretty well:

MERE CHRISTIANITY, page 56: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a good moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.




ROME (Reuters) - Sony has apologized for an advertising campaign for its PlayStation game console which featured a young man wearing a crown of thorns with the slogan "Ten years of passion".

Some Catholics were outraged by the ads, which ran in newspapers and magazines to celebrate the product's tenth anniversary.

"This time they've gone too far," said Antonio Sciortino, editor of Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family), a mass-circulation Catholic weekly.

"If this had concerned Islam there would have been a really strong reaction," Sciortino was quoted as saying in the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

In the Bible, Jesus was forced to wear a crown of thorns by mocking Roman guards before he was crucified. In the advertisement, a young man smiles cheekily, wearing a crown whose thorns are twisted into the geometric shapes that are PlayStation's logo.

In a statement, Sony Computer Entertainment Italia expressed regret over the reaction to the advertisement. It acknowledged that the "spirit of the message was misunderstood" and said the campaign would not continue.

Sony's ad is not the first to irk Catholics in recent months.

"There's no religion any more", read a slogan for IKEA in an advert to inform Italians, whose Church attendance is steadily falling, that its furniture stores were open on a Sunday.

And two adapted versions of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper have been used for adverts that caused controversy in other predominantly Catholic countries.

French fashion designer Francois Girbaud featured Jesus as a woman with a table of glamorous disciples, while Irish bookmaker Paddy Power depicted the original Christians gambling, the traitor Judas clutching his 30 pieces of silver.