Avatar Partners with McDonald's
The amount of cognitive dissonance here is absolutely amazing to anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds. I'll leave it at that, since I have faith that anyone reading this who had seen Avatar and eaten at McDonald's is smart enough to figure out where I'm going with this.
On a related note, I would have dismissed the plot of Avatar as yet another tiresome example of the pure-hearted natives vs. big, bad white man story, but for one line. I'm paraphrasing here, but the Nav'i high priestess hit the nail on the head when she remarked that "nature does not choose sides, it only maintains the balance of existence." In other words, nature is fundamentally non-moral. Thus, if we want to have a worldview that is consistent with reality, i.e., not insane, we should root for our own side; if we have no dog in the race, we should root for the winner, whomsoever that may be.This comes with two caviats, however. First, I'm not calling the humans who sided with the Nav'i insane if they did so because they believed that the Nav'i had the better-adjusted worldview. Most people watching the movie, however, would probably root for the Nav'i out of feelings of pity or belief in inalienable righs.
Second, none of my reasoning so far has supposed the existence of the Abrahamic God. Admit God, and you can start making some arguments about the intrinsic worth of invididuals and, therefore, rights. As I've said before, if I weren't a Christian, I'd be a Nietzschian/philosophical pagan.
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