Avatar
When the Vatican goes after your movie, expect a payday:
The Vatican newspaper and radio station have called the film “Avatar” simplistic, and criticized it for flirting with modern doctrines that promote the worship of nature as a substitute for religion.
L’Osservatore Romano and Vatican Radio dedicated ample coverage to James Cameron’s big-grossing, 3-D spectacle. But the reviews were lukewarm, calling the movie superficial in its eco-message, despite groundbreaking visual effects.
L’Osservatore said the film “gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature.” Similarly, Vatican Radio said it “cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium.”
“Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship,” the radio said.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said that while the movie reviews are just that — film criticism, with no theological weight — they do reflect Pope Benedict XVI’s views on the dangers of turning nature into a “new divinity.”
Nature is in no danger of becoming a new divinity—that’s just the poor old Catholic church being consistent with the idea that helping filmmakers make more money is the way to go. Their condemnations and protests made bank for films like The Last Temptation of Christ and The Da Vinci Code, and now they are helping to ensure that Avatar is helped along as well. I guess it means more in the collection plate if they can convince church members to pay some sort of penance for skipping out on Mass to go see the film.
I have no plans to see Avatar in the near future, but I’ll probably watch it when it comes on FX or something like that. The last film that I saw was The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but that doesn’t make me a highbrow. It just means I don’t get out much.
Coach Skip: Basically, there’s three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.
Kristofferson: Got it.
Now, if nature became a new divinity, based on respecting the ecology and conserving our natural resources, it would hurt the coffers of the Catholic Church. The money they’re budgeting for next year would go to buying canvas tote bags and water bottles you don’t throw away. It would eliminate repression and guilt from the lives of millions, allowing us to be a more open and understanding society about things like sex, sexual desire, loneliness, fear and death. It would make this a cleaner and healthier planet full of guilt-free people who are able to enjoy healthy sex lives and operate without shame and fear clouding their judgement, and that will not do, of course.