Saturday, June 14, 2014

Unbelievable adverts: a short rant

I don't know about you, but I listen to the Unbelievable show as a podcast. This means that most of the adverts are cut out and we only get to hear the adverts from the main sponsors of the show.

For the past three years, ALL the main sponsor adverts have irritated me, because ALL of them have been grammatically incorrect in some way. The two main sponsor adverts at the moment are for Biola University and Reasons to Believe.

The Biola advert goes like this:
"Was Jesus really raised from the dead? How can we know that God exists? How do we explain evil, pain and suffering in the world?, and Can faith be reconciled with modern science? Few universities are bold enough to answer 'yes' to all these questions, but California's Biola University is premier amongst them..."
Hang on, only two of those questions can have yes/no answers. For questions 2 and 3, "yes" is a totally nonsensical answer. This is a university that answers reasonable questions with nonsense? Oh dear.

The Reasons to Believe advert is barely any better:
"Do the Bible and science really contradict each other? Is there really a historical Adam and Eve? These are only a few of the questions that seem to indicate an apparent conflict between science and faith, and this is why Reasons to Believe exists..."
So that's two questions. Not 'a few' questions. To be 'a few' questions you'd need more than two. And I don't think anyone out there is asking whether or not there is a historical Adam & Eve, surely the question is whether or not there was a historical Adam & Eve, sometime in history, in the past tense. 

Surely someone grumpier than me must have pointed this out to the folks at Premier Christian Radio before now? Surely someone there should actually care that their sponsors aren't talking nonsense? Maybe next year they'll have a grammatically correct advert... Then again, I hoped that last year, then Biola came along. Sigh.

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