Posted on 05/18/2006 3:45:21 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
Sounds right on the money to mem, MikeA. So many of these detractors of Christianity do it merely for the sake of justifying their own transgressions and soothe their own feelings of guilt, and it's not just homosexuals.
Conversly, many, such as myself, believe the NT to contain as much fiction as the Davinci code and it has nothing to do with sex.
Most of these people have an agenda. Your reasons are your own, I assume and you're not trying to shove anything down anyone's throat. That's fine with me.
You're right. I think much of the world has forsaken Christianity by convincing themselves it's either archaic or all "mythology." This is why we have churches in Europe that are all but empty on Sunday.
I have a couple friends who are like this, and it's only because they've in the past lived the most eggregious lifestyles that they now must convince themselves there is no God and thus no need for guilt and repentence. As you say, it's not merely confined to homosexuals but to a whole range of behaviors society seeks to justify as it persues its hedonistic course.
conversly = conversely
Davinci = da Vinci
what fiction in the New Testament?
Well, to be honest, it's more like midgets pounding on the gate. Because the book is such a mess and because Brown is such a hack, I doubt this will have much of a lasting, detrimental effect on Christianity.
I think the indignation over the subject matter is just fanning the fire and it's exactly what Brown, Howard, McKellan, et al are hoping for. I'd like to see more indignation over the fact that someone told Brown he has any talent.
Movie actors:is there anything they don't know?
The last paragraph is priceless...
WONDER LAND
Holy Sepulcre!
"The Da Vinci Code" shows that conspiracy theories have no limits.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, May 19, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
"The Da Vinci Code" would not be the subject of this column had it not sold 60.5 million copies, according to its publisher Doubleday. Of course this does not make it the best-selling book of all time. That title, as irony would have it, goes to the Bible, half of which one of Dan Brown's characters dismisses as "false."
Like the Bible but unlike Mr. Brown's novel, most of the books in the sales Pantheon have had utilitarian staying power--McGuffey's Reader, the Guinness Book of Records, Noah Webster's "The American Spelling Book," Dr. Spock's baby book and the World Almanac. Now comes "The Da Vinci Code," selling twice as many copies as the 30 million attributed to Jacqueline Susann's "The Valley of the Dolls."
"The Valley of the Dolls" was about people having sex. "The Da Vinci Code" is about Jesus leaving Mary Magdalene pregnant with his baby while he dies on the cross. So in a sense, Mr. Brown's novel respects tradition.
Still, it boggles the mind, and the struggling soul, that "The Da Vinci Code" has sold 60.5 million copies in 45 languages. Sales in the U.S. are 21.7 million, in the U.K. nine million, more than 4.7 million each in France and Japan, 3.6 million in Germany, 1.2 million in China and, no surprise, 143,000 in Romania.
A righteous army has formed to prove everything Dan Brown says about the early Christian church is false, which it most certainly is. Mr. Brown's history pales against the real story of Christianity's first centuries. I recommend two gems: Henry Chadwick's "The Early Church" (Penguin) and Peter Brown's "The Rise of Western Christendom" (Blackwell). Grand, thrilling drama.
But markets don't lie. Clearly Mr. Brown knows something that is true. What is it?
To answer the mystery of Dan Brown's unholy tale, I visited the church-like quiet of Barnes & Noble on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue and asked an attendant where the book was. He arched his brow--as Mr. Brown's characters tend to do every few paragraphs--and whispered, "The Da Vinci table is over there."
The table held many treasures. I discovered the polymathic physician Sherwin B. Nuland's "Leonardo da Vinci," a delightful Penguin biography that has nothing to do with Mr. Brown's book. Checking that no one who knew me was nearby, I opened "The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus" because its cover promised an "Interpretation" by the eminent English professor Harold Bloom, a sometime contributor to this page, who remarks that the book's first Saying "is not by Jesus but by his twin."
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, preparing for today's opening of Tom Hanks and Ron Howard's apparently awful movie, has created a "Da Vinci Code" Web site addressing such issues as "The Witch Killing Frenzies." A spokesman for the bishops, in a nice touch of self-confident understatement, said the bishops would be concerned "if only one person" came away from "The Da Vinci Code" confused about the church. OK, maybe three or four did.
During my own long, hard slog through "The Da Vinci Code" lectures on the sacred feminine and the pagan roots of iambic pentameter, I most appreciated how Dan Brown, his own authorial eyebrow raised, slyly slips in a wink-wink sentence lest people think he really is nuts.
Chapter 40: "Everyone loves a conspiracy." (Italics, needless to say, Mr. Brown's.)
Chapter 48: "It was all interconnected."
Chapter 55, after Prof. Teabing's arcane summary of eighty gospels (Mr. Brown's italic): "Sophie's head was spinning. 'And all of this relates to the Holy Grail?'" My thoughts exactly, Sophie.
But the final clue to the hoax arrives in Chapter 60: "Langdon held up his Mickey Mouse watch and told her that Walt Disney had made it his quiet life's work to pass on the Grail story to future generations." I'll bet that line isn't in the movie.
Here's my theory of "The Da Vinci Code." Dan Brown was sitting one night at the monthly meeting of his local secret society, listening to a lecture on the 65th gospel, and he got to thinking: "I wonder if there's any limit to what people are willing to believe these days about a conspiracy theory. Let's say I wrote a book that said Jesus was married. To Mary Magdalene. Who was pregnant at the Crucifixion. And she is the Holy Grail. Jesus wanted her to run the church as a global sex society called Heiros Gamos, but Peter elbowed her out of the job. Her daughter was the beginning of the Merovingian dynasty of France. Jesus' family is still alive. There were 80 gospels, not four. Leonardo DiCaprio, I mean da Vinci, knew all this. The 'Mona Lisa' is Leonardo's painting of himself in drag. Da Vinci's secret was kept alive by future members of 'the brotherhood,' including Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Victor Hugo. The Catholic Church is covering all this up."
Then Dan Brown said softly, "Would anyone buy into a plot so preposterous and fantastic?" Then he started writing.
The real accomplishment of "The Da Vinci Code" is that Dan Brown has proven that the theory of conspiracy theories is totally elastic, it has no limits. The genre's future is limitless, with the following obvious plots:
Bill Clinton is directly descended from Henry VIII; Hillary is his third cousin. Jack Ruby was Ronald Reagan's half-brother. Dick Cheney has been dead for five years; the vice president is a clone created by Halliburton in 1998. The Laffer Curve is the secret sign of the Carlyle Group. Michael Moore is the founder of the Carlyle Group, which started World War I. The New York Times is secretly run by the Rosicrucians (this is revealed on the first page of Chapter 47 of "The Da Vinci Code" if you look at the 23rd line through a kaleidoscope). Jacques Chirac is descended from Judas.
None of this strikes me as the least bit implausible, especially the latter. I'd better get started.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
anyone who goes to see this money is putting money in Satans pocket.
Amaxing editorial...
May 19, 2006, 7:03 a.m.
Hate at the Movies
Something to offend everyone.
By Michael Novak
On a balmy May 18 Thursday night, my wife Karen and I attended a preview of The Da Vinci Code.
Confession: I have not read the book. Its first few pages of bad writing and howling history filled me with too much disgust.
Yet, as a thriller the movie moved faster and with more tension than I had expected. People were being bloodied everywhere; cars were screaming madly on narrow streets or on wooded dirt roads, it was hard to tell who various people were; the plot and the madness were so complex that I had a hard time telling who the good guys were (if any); and the splayed, blood-oozing victims were too anonymous to seem like anything but cardboard stuffing. Tom Hanks was woefully miscast, amiable but without much intelligence playing in his eyes even when he was supposed to be being clever—but it did turn out that his sidekick, the pretty French detective, was actually the only living descendant of Jesus Christ, by the "wife" of the Christ, Mary Magdalene.
True, the number of deranged characters for one movie was a bit overabundant, and it did not help that nearly all of them were Catholics of one sort or another—except for the secular hero (Ian McKellen) who was also led away towards the end screaming incoherently.
All this was expected. The one thing that really shocked me was the movie's underlying intention, stated several times with great clarity: the depth and passion of its anti-Christian, anti-monotheism craziness. To say the movie wishes actually to be the anti-Christ would only sound extravagant; still that is the constant and underlying message. The "heroes" of the film have to save the world from the oppression and injustice brought into it, not only by Christianity, but by all monotheistic religions. Wherever there is monotheism, the secular hero says, there is violence, or oppression, or something like that.
All that matters, Tom Hanks tells the only living descendant of Christ, is what you believe. Not truth, not reality, but whatever you believe. That's what matters. You make up reality as you go. The professor Hanks plays makes plain that he believes that Jesus is only a man—a man and that's all. A great moral teacher, perhaps, but only a man.
That, of course, is the one thing that the Jesus himself does not allow us to believe. If Jesus is only a man, he is no great moral teacher. He is on the contrary a fraud, a pretender, a horrible spendthrift with his own life and the lives of his apostles—all twelve of whom met a martyrdom like his, some of them crucified, all of them most brutally killed without the utterance of a single recantation. If He was not the Son of God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he was either a mountebank or a lunatic, and deserves our contempt, not our praise. His every moral teaching would be vitiated by its radical emptiness and fraudulence.
One of the very meanings of being secular today, of course, is to believe that Jesus was exactly all these things—a lunatic or a fraud and, more important than anything else, no more than a man. So The Da Vinci Code will not exactly be stating any new thesis that secular people don't already accept. What it may succeed in doing, however, is to make dramatically manifest the silliness, madness, and love of illusion in what being secular means, at least to these film makers. It is for this reason, perhaps, that so many secular critics have found this movie repellent. Although it seeks to mock Christians and Jews, it actually makes a purely secular view seem absolutely batty.
In short, there is enough in this film to offend everybody.
Some, of course, may be so crazed themselves that they will truly enjoy the Catholic bashing—all these scheming, hideous, bloodthirsty, maddened cults and their captives, all those mysterious blessings and signs of the cross on the way to murder most vile. Is this what the author and filmmakers actually think moves the more than 1.2 billion Catholics on earth today? Are these artists so blinded by hatred that they cannot see, in the very paintings and glorious churches aspiring toward the sky in whose midst they do their filming, a reaching upwards toward "the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars"?
I think I have never for two-and-a-half hours felt so surrounded by decadence and hostility toward Christ. Yet I must admit that the film was glitzy with the art of the makers of thrillers. One could never be sure when one scene, then another, then another, then another, would be cut short by a murderous lunge, a shot ricocheting around a closed space, a door slamming, a car screeching. From one shock to another, one's stomach absorbed punch after punch.
Afterwards, I sure felt like a strong double bourbon. And I felt eager to forget as soon as I can the sheer malicious hatred that swirls up from this film.
— Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.
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