Avatar and the Beginning of Religion

By David French
SixSeeds.org
Thursday, Dec 31st 2009

As a sci-fi geek, I have to make an admission: I’ve always hated the Force.The entire concept strikes me as little more than dorm-room spirituality . . . validating the idea that one can access mystical powers without ever dealing with messy concepts like divine will, that “destiny” exists without any entity actually making choices, and the ultimate result of mysticism is self-empowerment on a scale that make’s Barry Bonds’ drug-induced transformation look like nothing more than an extra day at the gym. Take a spirituality-obsessed nation (as we’ve always been), sprinkle in some primitive adaptations of eastern mysticism — such as the “yin” and “yang” -- sprinkle in a dash of the “me decade” of the 1970s, and you’ve got the Force.

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