[Flightdeck]

Someone who feels the need to "stop" this movie must have a weak and insecure faith indeed.

[maine-iac7]

Someone who feels the need to "stop" this movie must have a weak and insecure faith indeed.

Bingo -

Not to mention woefully unaware of other publications - NON-fiction - that have been in the public domain for millenia about the same themes...and the many in current print, again NON- fiction that are the source of Brown's 'ideas' -

These writer's books of NON fiction are much more detailed and documented then Brown's fiction tale, and yet, you don't hear bleep about them.

Curious.

One of the most enduring contemporary authors on the Jesus/Mary marriage, for example - and one that inspired Brown - is Margaret Starbird, a lifelong Catholic who set out to disprove this age old story.

She has an impressive 'rap sheet':

Margaret Starbird holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Maryland where she concentrated in comparative literature, medieval studies and German language, studies she pursued on a Fulbright Student Grant at the Christian Albrechts Universitat in Kiel, Germany. She taught German language at the University of Maryland for four years and for one year at North Carolina State University. She later studied at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, TN. She has lived and traveled extensively in Europe including pilgrimages to Black Madonna and Mary Magdalene shrines and Cathar citadels in Provençe

Her web site:

http://www.margaretstarbird.net/

I would recommend starting with her first NON-fiction book about the Jesus/Mary connection: "The Woman With the Alabaster Jar."

Just for fun - here's a stained glass window in a European church - made looonnngg before Brown was born. (Brown is being vilified and credited with 'ideas' that have been written about for many centuries -

And here's another author that will drive many wild, - with years of research and access to ancient archives, including the Vatican's: - Sir Laurence Garner

[No Truce With Kings]

"Someone who feels the need to "stop" this movie must have a weak and insecure faith indeed."

I would not go quite that far. I can understand why people -- even those whose faith was strong -- would be deeply offended by this movie. But those folks need to take a deep breath, and calm down if they think this movie can really hurt Christianity.

Dan Brown patched together Gnostic and Arian legend to create a potboiler mystery. The basic plot elements have been around almost as long as Christianity -- longer for Gnostism, which predates Christianity by a century, since about the third century for Arianism.

The da Vinci Code issues were examined and rejected by the early church -- pre-Constantine, so despite what characters in his novel claim, the issues were settled BEFORE Constantine. They keep popping up every couple of centuries, and keep getting rejected by the orthodox Christian mainstream (I used orthodox rather than Orthodox because I a refering to mainstream Christian belief rather than the belief only of the Orthodox Christian Church. mainstream Catholic and Protestant churches reject Gnostism and Arianism, too.)

Anyhow, if so many brilliant, albeit misguided theologians over the last two millenia have failed to incultate Gnostism or Ariansm in Christianity why should anyone fear that a novelist -- who is not a terribly good writer -- will succeed?