An Actual Conversation

An Actual Conversation

 “Hello, I’d like to know what you offer on NETFLIX—where can I go to read the inventory of possible choices?”

“Well Sir, there is a section on our website which is called “Browse” and you can see some selections there.”

“Yes, I have the site open.  I am looking at it now. There are about 6 or so listed.  Is that all you offer?”

“Oh know, we offer so many more.  It’s virtually limitless.” 

“Okay, but where can I go to read that inventory before I sign up?”  

“Well, I think the only way you can find out is if you sign up.”  

“So, let me understand.  You want me to give you my credit card number and email address before I know what it is I am getting?”

“Well, yes…but it is a free trial.”  

What is Really on Trial? 

  So of course, the marketing ploy is to get you signed up, get personal information which they can use, and then keep you as a customer out of habit.  Sound just a little like the Heath Care Bill—go ahead and pass it to see what is in it?  The way around the gimmick is to go to somebody who already got hooked into it and see the inventory that way.  

Remember the classic book, The Informed Heart by Bruno Bettleheim?  We retain “hearts of flesh,”—our humanity—in a high technological world by exercising our free will, the power to decide.  We degrade our humanity, the sense of self, when we become the automaton in any system that ropes us in before we can exercise a real decision.  I am better off, in other words, if I drive over to somebody’s house, watch it there, and then exercise my freedom as a person without just yielding to a blind trial run.  It’s in those words, “blind” trial that is the dead give-away to the scheme.  If it’s a blind trial—then you are blind signing up for it.  

Jesus had that uncanny way of confronting the beliefs of those who had signed up for their tradition and status quo without really checking out the bill of goods—and that’s what they got—a bill of goods!