Similar to Hunter, who was surprised to find that Avatar was more than a “left-wing, pantheistic film,” my favorite localist apologist, Caleb Stegall, found something to appreciate in the recent blockbuster:
It is curious to me that this movie has so obviously touched a raw nerve and gotten under the skin of a certain set of east-coast conservatives. It reminds me a bit of the over-reaction of the same set to a certain book about granola-toting and sandal-wearing cons!
I understand and agree with, to a point, the knock on Hollywood pantheism. That said, I found Douthat’s critique of the movie to be forced and artificial. It is true that the tall blue people were a bit tree-huggy, and their primitive beliefs were certainly based on American Indian-type pantheism or nature-worship. However, the primary expression of this was the native’s belief that all the living things in their home formed an interconnected whole which the natives both oversaw as caretakers and partook of as participants. Take out the fantasy and sci-fi elements and there isn’t anything here Wendell Berry hasn’t also said.
December 30th, 2009 | 8:12 am
Don’t dismiss it – Pantheism, however the definition it tweaked, begins to make rational sense once you fit a big missing piece back into the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. This is the conscious Sun, something intuitively recognized by every culture until the Church, not science, forcibly erased it. What brings life to our bodies is energy. Stars make their own energy fields as they release the light of life to the likes of us. Everything from an atom upwards has an energy field and once this is understood we start to see a Universe that is organized from the bottom up, not the top down – a Universe filled with intelligence and design that needs no Intelligent Designer. Dive deeper at http://www.sunofgod.net
January 4th, 2010 | 7:55 am
Yes, but what the movie like all Hollywood movies leave out (pretty much except for Apocalypto) is the universal underbelly virtually every pagan society have had — infanticide of less-than-perfect children, human sacrifice to appease the gods, and slavery of any beings not “of the tribe.”
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