Well dang, now I think I have to read it.

Yesterday, Tim needed to stay later at work because he took Monday off for "The Great Trailer Fiasco of 2006". So at the end of my workday, I tripped merrily a few blocks down and around in the sunshine and beautiful weather to the slug lines and grabbed a ride to my car.

And the guy driving had just put what has to be The DaVinci Code into the tape player (CD player? Don't know - it was an audiobook.) Chapter 1. And we got to chapter 5 or 6 on the drive home and, well, it was kind of interesting from a story perspective. Seriously, they used a space plane. How cool is that?

Now, I'm not 100% sure it was TDVC - but given that the main character's name was Langdon and it started out with a corpse branded with the word illuminati that for some reason he kept flipping upside down, I'm guessing this is the case. Anyone who's actually read the book want to let me know if I'm correct in my guess?

I guess as far as the whole controversy goes, I view this with two major points in mind. Firstly, and I'm by no means the first person to say it but I can't recall where I saw it recently to attribute the most current memory correctly, if your faith is so weak, shallow, easily challenged, what have you that you are swayed by a novel to believe something else that's contrary to what you believed in the first place - how well, seriously, did you actually believe it? (And how hard will it be for the next great thing - whatever it may be - to convince you that it's right, and so on throughout your life as you ride the waves of the "next big religion"?)

Secondly, it's fiction. Like Harry Potter (with which I also don't really have a problem), the Pern series, the Narnia series, the Lord of the Rings books and so on and so forth. I include Narnia and Middle Earth specifically because yes, they have Christian overtones and, in some cases are made to be allegories, but still, at the end of the day, non-Christians can enjoy them as great, wonderful tales of fiction, without having their belief system go by the wayside, if indeed they are strong enough in their beliefs to do so. Similiarly, Christians should be able to read TDVC or Harry Potter or, honestly, any non-Christian fiction book out there, without their foundation being shaken.

As for the idea that the story attacks Christianity - well, duh. The culture attacks Christianity. This is nothing new. But I would so much rather we got up in arms about the fact that casual sex is blindly accepted and no one even really bats an eye at some of the stuff that's on TV. Or about the fact that infidelity, divorce, swearing, lying, cheating, stealing, etc. are all basically condoned by the majority of society as long as no one else gets hurt. We don't live in a Christian society, so why should we expect that the bestselling fiction is going to represent - or even treat with kindness - the tenets of Christianity? And when we stand up and fuss about a book or a movie but don't make a fuss about the laws up for consideration in Congress daily - things that will have a much broader and long lasting impact than some book that is simply hoping that our fuss will add to its revenue - well, I think we do Christ, ourselves, and our culture a disservice.