So I was roaming around at Barnes & Noble the other day, spending the very thoughtful birthday gift card from the lovely miss Jaime, when I spotted somthing interesting. It was an entire little display pyramid dedicated to books written by people radically opposing Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Things that make you go hmmmmm.....

I must admit, it was not originally a book I was wild about reading, but after so many people telling me to try it, I did. nd I loved it. Three pages in and I couldn't put it down. Then I see all these religious types writing book about why the Da Vinci Code is not true, cannot be true, it's an evil book, blah, blah, blah. I have a number of thoughts on this.

The book is fiction. Although a lot of bits of it are based on reality or well-known legends or history, it is written as fiction, and Brown never tried to say otherwise. So why do these opposing people care?

The book never says that Catholicism doesn't exist...it just messes a little with what is behind it.

We all know, or at least we all agree, that grass is green. It's a functional agreement that helps us all get through the day. But if someone wrote a fictional novel in which grass were blue, had always been blue, must be blue, whatever, I doubt that anyone would rise up to write opposing books and point out why the blue grass book is evil. While it opposes the current reigning paradigm, it doesn't bother anybody.

Dan Brown also wrote a book called Dgital Fortress, in which the NSA is sneaky and underhanded and trying to spy on everyone all the time and treying to pretend that they don't. This may be true. They say they don't...they may be lying. This, unlike the blue grass issue, is pretty important to every day life, but there aren't a million books about why it isn't true. Of course, this may be a bad example, because NSA people would be stupid to do things that way, but you get the drift.

My point is that the controversy over Da Vinci code may mean that the Catholic church knows that their stories are not necessarily true, that people could possibly have good reason to believe other things, that it would be easy, even through fiction, to convince people away from the church's dogma, and that they need to make an effort to show people the "right" path. It means they are scared. By an author of fiction, albeit a pretty good one. If they were secure, they would not need the hefty defense.

Okay, so overall not a brilliant thought pattern, just interesting.

I may have a REALLY COOL visitor sometime soon. :)