Clergy accept pompous titles such as "Reverend", "The Most Reverend" and perhaps the
most pompous of all is the title of the leader of the Catholic Church, "His Holiness". (AP
Photo/Tony Gentile, Pool)
The Vatican has denounced James Cameron's blockbuster film, Avatar, for being unengaging and claims it attempts to replace divinity with Nature.
The story line of Avatar is similar to the 1990 film Dances With Wolves.
In Avatar the year is 2154 when a paraplegic ex-Marine is sent to a planet and befriends the natives and ends up fighting against his own people for the benefit of the natives.
In Dances With Wolves, a Civil War era army officer is sent to the western frontier to establish a fort. He becomes involved with the natives and fights for them against his own people. The Vatican may have something regarding Avatar's originality. After all, the Vatican knows fiction, that is what it is based on.
L’Osservatore Romano, a Vatican newspaper, wrote that the film “gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature.” The Vatican has spent nearly 2,000 years following an ancient Middle Eastern fable based on a teenage Jewish girl, Mary, who was pregnant prior to her marriage to her fiance, Joseph, and who claimed that the one who made her pregnant and who is the father of the child she was carrying, Jesus, was God.
Compare this twisted man-made Christian nonsensical belief which directly violates our God-given reason with the rational Deistic belief of the fictional characters in Avatar, the Na'vi, who believe in a guiding Force in Nature which they label Eywa. If the Pope would stop and think, he'd realize that the first article of belief in Christianity is belief in God. God is what the Na'vi call Eywa. But it appears they stop there, unlike the Jews, Christians and Muslims who attach to the natural, reasonable, simple and beautiful belief of God an unlimited amount of superstition and violence promoting nonsense. As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, "It has been by wandering from the immutable laws of science, and the right use of reason, and setting up an invented thing called revealed religion, that so many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself and the founder of a new religion, to supersede and expel the Jewish religion." The only way this bloody cycle of "revealed" religion will end is if people finally let go of these ancient myths and realize the only possible word of God is the Creation we are all a living part of. Again, as Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, "We can know God only through His works." And, ". . . it is necessary that we refer to the Bible of the Creation. The principles we discover there are eternal and of divine origin; they are the foundation of all the science that exists in the world, and must be the foundation of theology."
It is in the best interest of the Vatican to try and discourage people from embracing and using their God-given reason which points them to Deism and a Deistic belief in God. However, with communication at such a high level, and with Deism and Deistic ideas reaching a much larger audience through the Internet and through popular culture such as Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and movies like Avatar, their grasp on blind followers will continue to diminish. There is truly reason for hope in the 21 century!
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