Idiots Among Us

I'm a conservative, but I often find that other conservatives confuse passion with a lack of critical reasoning, giving conservatives a bad name when it comes to engaging in the debate of ideas.

In that vein, there's a conservative movie reviewer whose reviews, for all intents and purposes, read like those of an uneducated idiot.

Dr. Ted Baehr, whose title might imply the habits of an educated mind, appears to be one who likes to cast aspersions at "motes" without considering the "beam" in his own eye. Specifically, Dr. Baehr's review of the movie Avatar from James Cameron reaches a new low, apparently written in haste by a someone who can't quite put coherent thoughts together.

Ignoring, for the moment, the intent of Dr. Baehr's review and whether he understands the difference between environmentalism and colonialism (hint: the latter has to do with taking something that's not yours, from someone who owned it before you, via some form of "divine right" justification), let's look at the basic mistakes he makes in putting forth his argument.

Dr. Baehr's review is full of grammatical, logical and theological errors. Here are just three examples:

1.  "If only someone had edited this movie, it may have been more interesting" 

Ironically this sentence follows shortly after Dr. Baehr declares that "when you put spectacle first, you turn a great little movie like King King into King Bore."  In other words, Dr. Baehr forgot to edit his own snipe at Cameron's editing. Both visual and textual editing require review, and Dr. Baehr fails the grammar check on this point.

2. Dr. Baehr's paraphrase of Aristotle's sequencing of "entertainment" (according to Dr. Baehr) or "tragedy" (according to Aristotle) is wrong.

"Great entertainment puts plot first, character second, dialogue third, idea forth, music fifth and spectacle last, as Aristotle noted."


Dr. Baehr, in bastardizing the tragedy list for his own entertainment purposes, missed a few of Aristotle's points. The proper order is: plot, character, thought, diction, song, melody. At least Dr. Baehr could appear to be a "learned man" by getting the sequencing right.

3. Dr. Baehr makes a disturbing theological leap of faith when he suggests that all the aliens in Avatar needed was Jesus Christ. Seriously . . .

"What the . . .  aliens in the movie need to deliver them from their severe group think is the loving salvation available only through the true God, Jesus Christ."


Does Dr. Baehr really believe that aliens can be saved? If so, is he suggesting Christ went to die on multiple planets, and not just Earth?

I've sent an email to Dr. Baehr asking him to expound on those two questions.

His answers will tell us exactly what his theology consists of, which could be more dangerous than the flaws he attempts to explain in Cameron's fictional Avatar movie.

Maybe he would've been better off sticking with a single-sentence review in "movie speak" that translates just as effectively for conservative viewers as it does for liberal ones: Avatar is Pocahontas (Terrence Malick's The New World) meets Apocalypse Now.