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Not sure if people have seen this advert on the tube. It always hits me as having a deep spiritual meaning that I don’t like very much. You see a man who on first glance seems to be in a prayerful pose before a board of stockmarket figures reflected back onto itself. On closer inspection you see that he is not praying but holding onto some form of communication device. The advert pushes the importance of receiving the right information to be able to be in control.

The sad thing about this and other adverts, is that many are not facing up to the real reason this all went wrong, the over emphasis on markets and capitalism to mediate everything to do with our culture. In an earlier post I talked about the fact that we now have an unrestricted market society, and this is something some of us really think impoverishes our humanity and community. It seems that people are now turned back to information technology to help rebuild a sense of certainty in the fluidity of our complex market society.

This makes me sad. It was interesting yesterday also to hear on a Radio 4 programme, of an America Company that was focusing on the very same strategy it had before the crash in the States, because it believed it did not need to change, even though it had been bailed out by tax payers money. It seems many are addicted to a market economy and can not re-imagine another way of being. This is really why the church needs to be more engaged with seeking a better mixed economy, than the mess we have got ourselves in. I am hopeful that people will see that the real God is not a market, and our mutual welfare as a community is not dependent on our economic value to sell or buy things. Christianity has much to say on this matter, so we really need to challenge what seems to me to be, the idol of a market society.