Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

13 years after it first premiered, the science fiction movie Avatar was back in theaters last weekend, this time to prepare us all for a sequel, scheduled for a December release.

The original still stands as the highest grossing film of all time, the first movie to

surpass more than $2 billion in earnings.

It also stands as one of the clearest examples of how worldviews can be embedded in story

and of new age ideas embedded in a film.

Chuck Colson offered a helpful worldview analysis of Avatar, and given its re-release

last weekend, that's worth another hearing. So here's Chuck Colson. Lots of people are saying

they're blown away by the movie Avatar, but what they mean is the special effects are beyond

belief. But so is the movie's premise. This year's Oscar race as being billed as a duel between ex-spouses.

Catherine Bigelow, the director of the critically acclaimed war film about Iraq called the Hurt Locker,

and her ex-husband James Cameron, director of the phenomenally lucrative 3D Blockbuster Avatar.

But Avatar is part of another more important competition, one between competing accounts of

where salvation is to be found. Avatar, which broke the all-time box office record previously held

by Cameron's film, Titanic, has been compared to the 1990 Best Picture winner Dances with Wows.

The comparison makes sense, because in both films, a man sent to remove indigenous peoples

from their ancestral home comes to identify with those people.

In both films, the natives are depicted as noble beings, living in harmony with nature

in an environmental utopia, and there would-be to spoilers represents the worst about

Western civilization.

What's more, both men are saved by their encounter with the natives.

...