James Cameron’s Oscar winning film Avatar may have broken new technological ground, but it perpetuates an age old philosophy. Philosophical Dualism draws a sharp distinction between the material and the spiritual realms, between the visible and the invisible. Dualistic worldviews inevitably end up exalting one realm or the other, the spiritual or the material.

Philosophical Dualism

Plato, for instance, taught that the spiritual realm, the realm of the Forms, was the really real and that the material realm was just the real, a mere replication, a copy, of the Forms. The Forms are superior to the inferior things they create. The classic example is the Form of a chair in the spiritual, which determines the chair-ness of a chair in the material world. The Form of the chair is superior to the chair itself. The material world is a derivative of the spiritual world. The spiritual is greater the material world is lesser.

What’s is an “Avatar”?

This dualism is also played out in Eastern worldviews like Hinduism and Buddhism, where the goal is to… {keep reading}