The movie Avatar's demonic content?

Pastor Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill megachurch in Seattle, spent part of his Feb. 14 sermon [.pdf] arguing there os throughout "Avatar." The argument was part of his sermon entitled "Luke: Jesus And Demons."

Critic Menachem Wecker not only takes Driscoll to task and concludes by casting aspersions on his motives:

I know the headlines that come along with speaking of the devil must be tempting to Driscoll (as they are for Robertson), but maybe the devil resides not in Haitian voodoo and in Avatar, but in the knee-jerk invocations of the devil which seem to keep popping up. The Na'vi offer blessings over the animals they kill for food. Could there be a better reference to Christians praying for their enemies (the animals often try to kill the Na'vi) and Jews, Christians and Muslims thanking God for their food?

What do you think?

The applicable text from the sermon is:

The world tempts you to sin, to use people, to disobey God, to live for your own glory instead of his own, to be a consumer instead of generous, that's the world system.

And if you don't believe me, go see Avatar, the most demonic, satanic film I've ever seen. That any Christian could watch that without seeing the overt demonism is beyond me. I logged on to christianitytoday.com and the review was reflective of Christianity today, very disappointing. See, in that movie, it is a completely false ideology, it's a sermon preached. It's the most popular movie ever made, and it tells you that the creation mandate, the cultural mandate is bad, that we shouldn't, we shouldn't develop culture, that's a bad thing.

Primitive is good and advanced is bad and that we're not sinners, we're just disconnected from the divine life force, just classic, classic, classic paganism, that human beings are to connect, literally, with trees and animals and beasts and birds and that there's this spiritual connection that we're all a part of, that we're all a part of the divine.

It presents a false mediator with a witch. It presents false worship of created things rather than Creator God in absolute antithesis to Romans 1:25, which gives that as the essence of paganism. It has a false incarnation where a man comes in to be among a people group and to assume their identity. It's a false Jesus. We have a false resurrection. We have a false savior. We have a false heaven. The whole thing is new age, satanic, demonic paganism, and people are just stunned by the visuals. Well, the visuals are amazing because Satan wants you to emotionally connect with a lie.

[H/T: Monica Guzman]