The discussion of Super Bowl commercials has died down, but it takes time for me to think things through, so I’m just now chiming in on something:
Why wasn’t the money spent on this given to the poor instead?
It was a question asked about the Super Bowl commercial, “He Gets Us,” which was about Jesus, which cost $14,000,000
It’s funny that this objection is almost an exact quote from scripture, where people objected to the perfume that a woman used to anoint Jesus’ feet: “Why wasn’t this sold and the money given to the poor?” they asked just like our Super Bowl commercial detractors. Jesus essentially said it was hers to give, that it was a beautiful gesture, and that they could get back to the poor at any time.
I don’t want to defend religion, but fourteen million dollars spent on that campaign is a mere pittance to the money spent on the entire game. A lot of products were advertised that day. I read online that the amount of money paid for the fifty minutes of commercials was $700,000,000. That’s a lot of beer, cars, and avocados, folks.
Add to that the money spent on tickets, which cost $10,000 apiece, totaling $620,000,000.
Put those two numbers together, and that’s 1.32 billion dollars.
Let’s say this together, folks:
One Billion, Three Hundred Twenty Million Dollars.
I’m an atheist, and I have a problem with the perpetuation of something I think is a lie or delusion, so I’m not happy about a commercial proposing that the world should worship and obey an unseen, unproven entity.
But additionally, I think helping the poor and hungry needs to take a greater priority than football in this country–which, as I’ve said before, is a religion, too. The money spent on one commercial, religious or not, doesn’t make much difference. However, the 1.32 billion dollars spent on ONE GAME could make a sizeable dent.
And yeah, that bothers me.
Deep Calls 
Well, there’s also a small problem of assigning G*d the male pronoun of “he.” Although I am a believer, and believe that Jesus Christ is the “living son of G*d,” I also believe that Christ appeared to the people of Judea as male only because they would have otherwise ignored Christ in that patriarchal society.
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The poor are always with us because our leaders, specifically politicians, want it that way. It fits their narrative that people are born into their class, which I find to be a disgusting Christian thing.
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There is a lot of double-speak going on with the whole “He gets us” which would want us to believe that the powerless among us have nothing to fear from Christians, while the political church is fighting like crazy (almost wrote, “like hell”…), to marginalize anyone that doesn’t submit to their cherry-picked theology. The money spent is outrageous, but hardly the point. WWJD… some folks need to reread Matthew and take a look at who he spent his time with and who he leveled criticism against. Ugh.
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