The Da Vinci Code: Who Cares?

So The Movie is out, or about to be and apparently many Christians are upset about the movie. There has ben calls for boycotts. Reports CNN:

Anger over "The Da Vinci Code," premiering Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, escalated Tuesday as Christian groups from South Korea, Thailand, Greece and India planned boycotts, a hunger strike and attempts to block or shorten screenings.

The first thing that has struck me is the number of "cullud" folk up in arms over the religion that their colonizers failed to practice but none the less saw fit to impose on them. On the other hand It seems to me that this is Christendoms Cartoon Incident(tm) sans the burning and looting; a fact I am sure will be lorded over Muslims in the future.

It is good that the South Koreans were bright enough to rule against Christian groups seeking the secular government to effectively censor religious critique.

n South Korea, which has 13 million Protestants and 4.6 million Roman Catholics, a court ruled Tuesday that a Christian group's request for an injunction to block screenings lacked merit.

"As it is clear that the novel and movie are all fiction ... there is no probability that the movie can make viewers mistakenly believe the contents of the movie are facts," chief judge Song Jin-hyun said in his ruling.

WHile I applaud the decision I find the rationale behind it to be as faulty as the Brown V. Board of Ed decision. While the novel may be a work of fiction, some of the content therein, as I have heard since I haven't read the book and don't plan on doing so, is not fiction. It is these non-fictional parts that scare the Christian establishment. For example, any religious scholar knows that the "official" decision that Christ was God was made at the council of Nicea. This is a position rejected by Muslims possibly because Mohammed formed his religion in opposition to the now colonized "new judaism." If you ask the average lay-Christian about this they would look at you with a blank stare and may offer something along the lines of "the council only canonized the fact of Christ's Godnesss."

Whatever.

This particular gem:

The Christian Council of Korea, an umbrella group of 63 South Korean Protestant denominations, said it respected the ruling but would lead a boycott of the movie, which it said defiles the sanctity of Jesus Christ and distorts facts.

Struck me as funny given that the "Holy Book" of Christianity is a pack of distortions. Of course that particular fact is known by very few of those boycotting.

Then there is this fool:

In mostly Hindu India, which is also home to 18 million Roman Catholics, Joseph Dias, head of the Catholic Secular Forum, began a hunger strike in downtown Bombay and said other people were joining him.

"We want the movie to be banned," he said.

Well at the very least I can say that he believes what he believes. I'm sure if he dies some idiots will blame the government for it though.

At the end of the day, I really could care less about the film, the book or even the theory inhabiting both. Why people are all up in arms and shook up because someone said Jesus got some and settled down is beyond me. I think that Christians are having a hard time accepting the fact that they no longer have a lock on the historical Jesus or the history of Christianity. Like Martin Luther postings on the Catholic Church doors, the people are able to get into the history for themselves and are discovering things that many have kept from view. They are putting these ideas and information into the public sphere and the establishment is not happy. I cannot imagine what would happen if a popular movie came out exposing the African, specifically, Khemetic origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam complete with Jesus sitting at the feet of Gnostics sucking up ancient knowledge. That would be a book I'd read and a movie I would pay for.

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