Avatar: Eternal Life?

January 11, 2010 by Beth Davies-Stofka

Continued from Page 1

Sully's avatar blurs the lines. On the one hand, it is not Ewya's self-expression, grown as it is in a lab and controlled by a driver located remotely, in a separate body. On the other hand, it contains Na'vi DNA, which is Ewya. It is divine. When Sully's avatar is caught alone on Pandora and is found by Neytiri, Ewya blesses Sully's avatar, as if to say, "I see myself, this is me, I honor and caress myself." Luminous tiny creatures like dandelion spores surround him and cover him. They are pure, Neytiri tells him in wonder.

Ewya adopts Sully's semi-artificial hybrid as her own, and even offers him the opportunity to permanently leave his human body and upload into his avatar.

This has the potential to fundamentally alter the Na'vi conception of life. In their view, all energy is borrowed. But Sully's energy is not borrowed, it's new. His place of origin is light years away from Ewya. His scientist friends and allies take up permanent residence on Pandora, along with their equipment. Will they continue to grow avatars, and transfer into them in order to live out their natural lives as Na'vi? And why should they have to die? Here's the great thing: now no one has to die, or even grow old. They can simply transfer to another avatar.

Eternal life lived in a succession of avatars has long offered problems and opportunities in the fictional worlds of sci-fi. Pantheism is potentially contradicted by the notion that an essential individual energy can repeatedly recreate itself by generating new physical containers. If the body is merely a container that can be generated in a lab, then the essential energy of the individual, the "soul," takes on the status of private property. Not borrowed at all, but purchased outright.

If we really push this plot to its logical ends, then Avatar 2 should be at least partially about a deep conflict between religious conservatives among the Na'vi, straining to maintain the rhythmic harmonies of Ewya, and progressives ready to leap from avatar to avatar, never suffering and never dying. Will Ewya come to regret what she has done?

Beth Davies-Stofka teaches courses on comparative religion and the philosophy of religion. She has also been an online columnist and critic and contributes regularly to the Patheos site.

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About Beth Davies-Stofka

Beth Davies-Stofka teaches courses on comparative religion and the philosophy of religion. Her teaching and research focus in two areas: the challenges that violence and human suffering present to theological ethics, and explorations of philosophy and...

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