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Editor's note: Dr. Tom Snyder contributed to this column. Dr. Ted Baehr is founder and publisher of MOVIEGUIDE®: A Family Guide to Movies and Entertainment and founder and chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission. Dr. Tom Snyder is editor of MOVIEGUIDE®. © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com "The First Amendment provides for the separation of Church and State." "The Founding Fathers were all deists." "America is a racist country." "Cuba is a worker's paradise." "The Bible is contradictory." "Jesus Christ didn't die on the Cross." "The religious right in America wants to establish a totalitarian theocracy." "Modern homo sapiens are descended...

“As long as there has been one true God,” Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) tells Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), “there has been killing in his name.” You may have heard that the polytheist Romans were quite capable of killing monotheist Christians in the name of their own gods centuries before Christians were in any position to be killing anyone. According to Teabing, however, it was Christian atrocities against pagan Romans — not vice versa — that prompted the Emperor Constantine to decriminalize Christianity. That’s right: Constantine’s 313 edict of toleration was intended to defuse intolerance by Christians against pagan Romans...

MOVIEGOERS in Manila may have to go to neighboring cities to watch “The Da Vinci Code” after the city council yesterday passed a resolution prohibiting the showing of the controversial movie. The resolution said the movie, which was based on US author Dan Brown’s explosive novel, “is undoubtedly offensive and contrary to established religious beliefs which cannot take precedence over the right of the persons involved in the film to freedom of expression.” The resolution, which was passed just hours before cinemas in Manila and other parts of the metropolis began showing the movie, cited a provision in the Revised...

“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.” (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239) The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but...

The Da Vinci Code premiers to criticism in Poland The Da Vinci Code the film by Ron Howard after the controversial book by Dan Brown, premiers today in Poland. Both the book and the film have been strongly criticized by the Catholic Church in Poland with archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz calling to boycott the film for its blasphemous presentation of Christianity. Report by Agnieszka Bielawska 19.05.06 The da Vinci Code premiered in Cannes , but contrary to expectations has been negatively reviewed by critics. What will be the reaction of the public remains to be seen, the film was long awaited...

As the Da Vinci Code's approval ratings (15%) appear to be settling far beneath even President George Bush's immigration program, and left-wing conspiracy theories begin to sprout up that the whole controversy is just Karl Rove's evil plot to distract America from the Iraq War / Halliburton / The Washington Nationals' bullpen woes, I thought I'd see if it were possible that such a poorly reviewed movie could become a hit. So I checked the list of 324 movies which have made $100 million for any movies which seemed like they could have gotten such low ratings. These, then are...

By the Christian History Institute “Blinding Ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!” Leonardo Da Vinci, quoted in THE DA VINCI CODE, p. 231 In every age, there have been attacks on Jesus and the teaching of Scripture. Jesus has been an offense to the world from the very beginning. One recent attack is particularly beguiling because it is so entertaining. It’s author, Dan Brown, brashly assures us his account is based on the actual historical facts, but THE DA VINCI CODE paints either an uninformed or intentionally false picture of the early church. Herein, we want...

War on Christianity has been declared. On which side of the battle line will you stand? The movie version of Dan Brown's book, THE DA VINCI CODE, is now in theaters. Although the movie significantly waters down the unrelenting, anti-Christian attacks and virulent paganism and goddess worship of the novel, it promotes the book and contains enough falsehoods and scurrilous conjecture to distort the truth about Jesus Christ, the Bible, Christianity, and God. That, coupled with the book’s popularity and some Christians’ ignorance about their faith, leads us to believe that the movie, and the attention it draws, will increase...

Could I have inadvertently committed a mortal sin by buying and reading The Da Vinci Code? One cannot commit any sin “inadvertently.” A mistake cannot be a sin. Sin always is a deliberate act of one’s will. For a sin to be mortal or spiritually deadly, the matter involved has to be grave (or perceived to be grave), and ... http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:lBa6WamA5hAJ:www.dioceseoflincoln.org/snr/ask.htm+southern+nebraska+register+da+vinci&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

Gnosticism is probably hotter now than it has been since—well, over 1,500 years ago. As The Da Vinci Code hits movie theaters and probably extends its three-year run on the New York Times bestselling fiction list, Gnostic books like The Gospel of Judas and The Lost Gospel are also prominent on nonfiction bestseller charts. Peter Jones, professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary California and director of Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet (cwipp.org) is the author of The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back and other books that critique anti-Christian doctrines, including Cracking Da Vinci's Code (Cook Communications) and the newly...

`Jesus is the subject of both The Da Vinci Code and the New Testament. The book and the movie, scheduled for release today, are fiction, whereas Christians claim the New Testament is the Word of God. The book is filled with tantalizing ideas about Jesus. The New Testament is a document written exclusively to promote Jesus as the Messiah. That narrow scope helped assure the novel's success and the church's ire.` Much of the church is aghast at the audacity of author Dan Brown's treatment of Jesus. Brown tells readers more than the church wants them to think about Jesus....

STEUBENVILLE — There’s been a stir of excitement and debate among scholars and historians ever since the release of Dan Brown’s novel, ‘‘The Da Vinci Code.’’ But with the release of the movie version today, that stir has accelerated into a frenzy over the controversy that some scholars fear will influence the faith people have in Christianity. ‘‘It presents a distorted picture of Jesus and the Catholic church and other Catholic organizations,’’ said Alan Schreck, professor of theology at Franciscan University in Steubenville. The novel alleges that the lost Gnostic gospels portray Jesus as an average person who falls in...

Da Vinci Code actor: Bible as much "fiction" as the movie. In a Wednesday Today session in Cannes, France with actors and producers of the Da Vinci Code movie, Matt Lauer asked about how, given how many want the movie to be clearly labeled "fiction," they would have "felt if there was a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie? Would it have been okay with you?" Actor Ian McKellen replied: "Well I've often thought that the, the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying, this is fiction. I mean walking on water? I mean it takes...

What the president's immigration speech and "The DaVinci Code" have in common. What was missing in the president's approach the other night was the expression, or suggestion, of context. The context was a crisis that had gone unanswered as it has built, the perceived detachment of the political elite from people on the ground, and a new distance between the president and his traditional supporters. The president would have done well to signal that he knew he was coming late to the party, as it were; that he'd come to rethink his previous stand, or lack of a stand, and...

Christian pollster George Barna is offering some intriguing findings about the perceived and predicted influence of The Da Vinci Code, in both the written and theatrical form. In short, he says his findings indicate that reading the book -- or viewing the upcoming movie -- is more likely to confirm rather than change people's religious views. The best-selling novel by author Dan Brown has been read "cover to cover," says The Barna Group, by about 45 million adult Americans. That equates to approximately 20 percent of all adults, making it "the most widely read book with a spiritual theme, other...

Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code is one of the most popular best sellers in recent history and the Sony motion picture to be released this Friday (May 19) is expected to be the first major blockbuster of the summer (given how relatively poorly MI3 performed). All this despite -- or, perhaps, because of -- being pervasively condemned by Christian leaders.

Cannes-Last night, Cannes Film Festival hosted the world premiere of The Da Vinci Code movie. Never was a debut so globally hyped. Never was a movie so awaited; never was excitement globally greater.

<p>In the opening scene of The Da Vinci Code, an old man is gutshot by Paul Bettany, who has been covered in pancake makeup. The film then cuts to a lecture delivered by Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of “religious symbology,” who is in France presenting what appears to be a version of the “What is This Picture” feature from Jack and Jill magazine (you know, the one where a super close-up of a weird shiny black object is revealed to be a button). As this lecture goes on the old man is dying offscreen, but not before he runs around the Louvre leaving anagrammatic messages written in the invisible ink pen he keeps on hand for any such occasion, as well as rehanging a giant framed painting he took off the wall while being chased by Bettany. Everything that follows in The Da Vinci Code is ludicrous, but nothing ever manages to top the image of this old man, bleeding profusely from his stomach, picking up and rehanging a huge painting. Except that perhaps the old man next strips naked, paints a pentagram on his own chest in his own blood and makes sure to die in a posture that will recall a Da Vinci drawing.</p>

They say The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than any book since the Bible. Good thing it has a different ending. Dan Brown's novel is utterly preposterous; Ron Howard's movie is preposterously entertaining. Both contain accusations against the Catholic Church and its order of Opus Dei that would be scandalous if anyone of sound mind could possibly entertain them. I know there are people who believe Brown's fantasies about the Holy Grail, the descendants of Jesus, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei and the true story of Mary Magdalene. This has the advantage of distracting them from the theory...

The first reviews of the Da Vinci Code are in, and they are ugly. Uglier than Helen Thomas' remake of Beach Blanket Bingo. Well, not quite. But they're pretty bad. Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer measures the movie at 18%. Only 7 out of 36 reviews have been positive. And some of these reviews are coming from pretty flaky and unusual sources. One comes from the web-zine, "Spirituality and Practice." The beliefs of the web site shine through the review: "In our era, a great and fierce battle is being waged by zealous, rigid, and close-minded Christians against more progressive Christians and...