Church of Scientology Runs Commercials on CNN

(MoneyWatch)  The Church of Scientology has launched an ad campaign on CNN, according to Gawker.

The ad shows a bunch of white and Asian people lost in the anomie of everyday life -- looking out of the window during a school exam, surrounded by a crowd at Grand Central in New York -- as a thoughful voiceover intones:

We're all looking for it ... that unexplainable emptiness that can only be filled with one thing ... the truth.

The ad will be examined closely in the agency business, which has its own connections to Scientology. Most prominently, former Leo Burnett chairman/chief creative officer Cheryl Berman was well-known as a Scientologist (and the subject of a large number of wacky web-based rumors.) Berman left the shop in 2006.

Gawker thinks the ad is "deeply creepy" and looks like an Effexor ad.

Writing personally, the most annoying thing about it is the scene where a man walks through a library, dragging his hands along a set of bookcases. "Some of us have been looking our whole lives," the voiceover says. The implication of the imagery is that answers cannot be found in books, which are all the same. As such, the ads fuel that strong, strange strain in American culture which regards edukashun -- facts generally and science specifically -- with suspicion.

Other nations -- notably the Chinese -- don't have these delusions. And they will become our bosses in about 30 years unless Americans become less delusional about books and facts.