God is a world-brain in 'Avatar.' Would you have faith?
December 21st 2009 21:14
Signature Tune
Zoe Saldana is one of the Na'vi, residents of Pandora who believe in a God of all things, in the movie
20th Century FoxJeff Weiss at Politics Daily has gone off to Avatar and come back with a question on the nature of God.
The thin plot of James Cameron's latest blockbuster has humans battling the Na'vi, resident dwellers of planet Pandora, for access to the planet's resources. Whoops, it turns out that the Na'vi have a "God" on their side -- sort of.
Weiss finds in it a "mash-up of American Indian, earth-based faiths and even links to the Hindustan Times for their view. But Weiss says Cameron goes further...
It turns out that the Na'vi deity that they call Eywa is real as rocks. Trees, plants and many animals have literal connections to each other, forming synapses in a giant world-mind. A mind that manifests itself at a key point of the plot in a way that leaves no ambiguity about whether "she" is real or not.
But Weiss thinks religion is based in...
faith in some aspect of the transcendent that cannot be proven using the material stuff of the ordinary world. Explaining Eywa is a matter of neurophysics, not theology. So it's not about religion.
Over at The New York Times, Russ Douthat calls the film an apology for pantheism...
... Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now. It's the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It's the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like The Lion King and Pocahontas. And it's the dogma of George Lucas's Jedi, whose mystical Force "surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.
Hmmm. I haven't seen Avatar but I'm not sure that's essential to debating the nature of God.
If there did turn out to be a thriving global consciousness, a world-mind as Weiss calls it, would that disprove God as you understand God? Certainly it takes the religion story out of the narratives we've told for centuries but it preserves the concept of an almighty who intervenes in human history.
Do you think there's a world-brain? Would you call it God?
From: USAtoday - Faith and reason
| 17 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
