Saturday 19 April 2014

Spot the difference

Here's the teaser for a four page advertisment feature in our local free sheet, by the Qur'an project:
According to conventional wisdom, people these days have short attention spans, so maybe the people who cobbled this together figured that the punters would skim-read enough to see the NASA logo next to the picture of the holy book and the word "FREE" in red caps, then order their freebie without actually reading these two short passages and noticing that the first one is entirely unrelated to the second.

What have the Big Bang theory and cosmic background radiation got to do with heaven and earth being 'a joined entity', whatever that means? What do they say about this 'joined entity' being separated by a supernatural being? What do they have to do with every living thing being 'made from water'?

These things are a mystery to me, but not quite so mysterious as this puzzle. Why would anybody who lacks the functional literacy skills to understand that two passages, of less than thirty words each, are completely different from each other, want to order a book?

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