Ahem. Anyway…. As an atheist I’ve long felt that the subtle (and not-so-subtle) assumptions of the religious are largely conveyed and reinforced by the stories that get told and the way they get told. These stories, being fiction, tend to slip right by those critical thinking parts of the brain that many people tend to reserve for reality. How many times have we been told that “It’s only a story” or “It’s only a movie” when offering a critique of something meant to be light, insignificant, “mere entertainment”? Such things aren’t to be taken seriously – and how dare we think otherwise. Those who don’t realize this and refuse to “lighten up” simply think too much – right? Alas, such thinking seems to play right into the hands of those who try to spread and win support for ideas by bypassing evidence and logic. (This doesn’t even have to be a conscious process, of course; many traditional ideas get passed along by a comfortable/lazy shallowness rather than any premeditated desire to hoodwink others – just like people with colds don’t have to make a conscious choice to infect others in order to infect others – they just have to be blissfully ignorant of the many steps they could take to protect others from their germs.)

That said, here’s a recent essay that attempts to apply critical thinking skills to Avatar. Does it do a good job? Are its conclusions convincing? Plausible? Ludicrous?

You tell me! :-)

Heaven And Nature (Ross Douthat, Op-Ed Columnist/The New York Times; Dec 20)

It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been 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.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Related posts:

1. Is Your Religion True? Responses
2. Theism Vs. Religion… Again
3. Is Your Religion True?

That the film is finally opening here in the United States is most welcome, as it premiered in the UK back in September of last year and there was much talk that no US distributor would touch it due to Darwin being so ‘controversial’ here. Controversy is usually not a bad thing when marketing a film, but many speculated that there were fears that it would not find a significant audience here – which seems ridiculous.

I had a chance to chat online with the director, Jon Amiel, earlier this week and I asked him why it took so long to bring it to the US. According to Jon, the delay was not so much due to any controversy over its subject matter but more mundane difficulties in getting a British Indie flick overseas. What those difficulties are, I do not know.

Jon himself is something of a religious skeptic (“man created god, not the other way around”), but he not looking to change people’s minds with this film. Rather, he hopes that it succeeds in humanizing a figure that has become much maligned and misunderstood. While Darwin’s science and his theory of evolution play an important role (the title “Creation” refers both to the book of Genesis and the act of creating a masterpiece), at the center of the movie is Darwin’s conflicted relationship with religion and his wife. More than anything else, the loss of his beloved daughter, Anne, at the age of 10 (due to Scarlet Fever) pushed him into agnosticism.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to seeing it. And Paul Bettany looks like he was born to play (a young) Charles Darwin.

Trailer:

Interview with Randal Keynes:

Related posts:

1. How Sad Is This?
2. Evolution as a Biological Fact
3. A Modest Petition

Click here to see a video of Dawkins reading from and discussing his new book.

Related posts:

1. Did Dawkins Kill A Man?
2. Did Dawkins Kill A Man? (2)
3. More From Richard Carrier

There is a serious message at the heart of this film, but it is still pretty damn funny. And highly recommended.

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