"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?
Thank you for pointing this out. I can't seem to get my arms around the rational that insists that someone who gets upset about the blaspheming of Jesus Christ must have a weak faith. You can disagree with what they do with their offense, of course. And they may indeed have weak faith.
But it's not required. Sometimes it's the depth of the love that leads to the feeling of offense.
That's fine and wonderful, but why can't Brown just say he doesn't believe that Jesus and Mary were married and had a child? Brown will not denounce this theory either because it helps sells more books and/or that he really believes it. Brown intentionally implies that he has facts to back up this stuff, when in reality his alledged facts have been thoroughly discredited. There are A LOT of people who are buying into this blasphamous lie. I don't mind him making up stories about fictious people, but when he lies about history and known historical figures, I think it should be clearly stated that those 'facts' are not true.