Click here to get this post in PDF

Don’t focus on the obvious bait for conservatives in Avatar

The danger in discussing Avatar is to concentrate on the negatives, political, religious, military justice. There are so many. While I’d like to touch on some of those things, lest people think I endorse all of the movie’s messages, I want to concentrate on that which comes through sometimes unintentionally, sometimes subtly, and which can teach us about living biblically. I’d like to get the negative out of the way by the following basic statements and questions.

Obviously, as created by the writer and director, the natives on Pandora worship a different god from the true God, something one can do in a fictional tale of any form. The corporate CEO said some of the best lines in the movie, demonstrating the proper disrespect for pagan earth worship: “Hey, if you throw a stick on the ground around here, it becomes a sacred object to be worshipped.” (Or something to that effect.) Having said that, the movie can still teach us. Obviously, the humans were from a post-Christian world. Where were the evangelists, who normally arrive in remote areas before the businesses? Why did they send an anthropologist (Sigourney Weaver) to convince the natives to move? She’s always going to study the natives and appreciate and try to preserve their culture, not try to change them.

What about the traitor? I was shocked that friends and other movie goers weren’t more shocked by the main character’s ability to simply turn on his own people so easily and attack them. His treachery was of the most radical kind. He deserved a military court martial with a potential death sentence, had he lost the war.

At the same time, what a dumb idea – send a guy to live with a tribe and be like them. Of course, some affection will rub off. This was the warning of Deuteronomy 7 – Don’t let the natives corrupt you by letting their children marry yours, or your children will worship their gods. It’s religious preservation 101. But, we Americans send our children to pagan, secular, anti-Christian, tax-supported schools to learn how to live, so what’s the big deal? Facetious comment.

The Pandorans appear to be merely annoyed and disrespectful of the humans and not murderous toward them. However, the colonel’s speech at the beginning to the newbies on the planet seems to indicate hostile natives, like many of the Indians of the old American west. A little more history of the antagonism against the humans might have lessened our cheers for their warfare upon the humans at the end of the movie. But then, the movie maker would not have achieved his goal of making the humans look like greedy, heartless, capitalist, anti-environmental, colonial marauders – worthy of death.  Are we in the world of the environmentalist wacko, or what? We are. Having said that, the next post will explain the positive to be gleaned from the movie.

Here’s a teaser as to what can be gleaned from the movie that is positive. Think about what happens in general terms. A man comes down from the sky, takes on the form of the creatures, who don’t understand him, and after being rejected by these creatures and left to die, he returns in great power, becomes their king, and saves them from their enemies. Sound familiar? But there’s more.

To be cont’d.