Leonardo's Conspiracy

At the risk of being reviled by my family, I have to bring up this national debate and weigh in with some thoughts of my own. The DaVinci Code movie premieres later this week and brings a huge debate along with it. I must admit before I go any further that I have not read the book; I only have an idea of what is about based on news articles that I have read over the past several years. So now for my semi-informed, but highly intelligent analysis of the situation (if Dr. Phil can be a real doc, then I can be a subject matter expert on a book I haven't read).

The first thing that struck me as odd about this book is that Dan Brown was sued by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail when his book The DaVinci Code became a hot item. Now, why is this odd? Well...he was being sued basically for plagiarism. Ultimately the courts ruled that it could not be plagiarism since Holy Blood, Holy Grail is supposed to be a factual account of history and The DaVinci Code just builds a story around those historical facts. It would be like writing a biography on Lincoln and then suing someone for making the assisination of Lincoln an element of their story. Nobody can steal that idea....it an historical fact. So, if the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail really believed that their writing was historical fact, why sue Dan Brown for writing a fictional story around those historical events?

Next up, the conspiracy theory. Like I said before, I haven't read the book, so I don't know the details of the conspiracy that's revealed by the story, but doesn't this seem like our generation's Kennedy assasination or Elvis abduction? Americans (maybe just people) love a good conspiracy theory. Despite the fact that a good conspiracy never really holds together (e.g. Nixon and Watergate), somebody will crack and the whole thing will fall apart. For whatever reason, though, we want to believe that it is possible that a conspiracy spanning hundreds of years has pulled the wool over the eyes of millions of people and only just recently have we been granted access to the secret by Mr. Brown.

If you haven't been in a bookstore lately, you should drop by your local Barnes and Noble to get an idea of our love for a good conspiracy. At the one by my house, they have several tables covered with books on the truth about Jesus, the realy Bible, the secret life of the early church, etc. Several tables. People are eating this stuff up, but is anyone asking the first question that came to my mind? Some of these books say Jesus is really a myth, some say He was just a normal guy that had a wife and kids, some say He was sort of the Son of God, etc. My question is, how can all of these different opinions be the revelation of a conspiracy covered up by the church?

And don't even get me started on the history of the church. We all know that the Roman Catholic church has its share of dark history. The Crusades. The Inquisition. And as a result of those incidents there have been plenty of uprising against the church with the Reformation being the most famous. Are any of these conspiracy theorists really going to try and convince us that no one was able to uncover this grisly conspiracy at a time when a huge popluation of Europe was looking for ammunition against the church, but that they've been able to uncover it in a time when the cover up should be a million times easier to accomplish?

I could go on and on, but for now let the comments roll in....