Separation of Church and Sony: Gamespot PlayStation ad brings forth fire and brimstone from Vatican; Sony apologizes, pulls ad depicting crown of thorns with PS button-face symbols. In the console wars raging between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, taking aim at a competitor not only makes for good gossip and quotes, but also it's expected. No one will blink an eye if Microsoft irks Sony or if Nintendo brushes off Microsoft. But regardless of one's religious preferences, it's probably not a good idea to incense the big man upstairs or the house He built. An ad campaign from Sony in Italy has done just that, Reuters is reporting. Full-page ads celebrating the PlayStation's 10th anniversary recently ran in the country's newspapers and magazines. They featured a young man smiling sheepishly while wearing a crown of thorns. If that already sounds touchy, it gets worse. The thorns are contorted into the X's, O's, triangles, and squares--the symbols on the faces of the PlayStation's four main buttons. A phrase at the bottom of the ad reads "Dieci anni di passione," which translates to "Ten years of passion," a possible reference to Mel Gibson's controversial Jesus biopic The Passion of the Christ. "This time they've gone too far," Antonio Sciortino, editor of the Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family), told a local newspaper, according to Reuters. "If this had concerned Islam there would have been a really strong reaction." Sony has reportedly since apologized and has pulled the advertisement from circulation. Stuff like this is just going to get more and more common as the cultural is secularized and religion is marginalized. No one at SONY or at SONY's advertising agency raised a red flag on this one, so it got out to the public. Or worse, they did it knowing the reaction it would provoke and decided it would be inconsequential and probably the publicity would help. The other graphic is William Jennings Bryan He is a significant figure in American history for many things, one of which is the Cross of Gold speech.

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