The Da Vinci Joke

I realize the reason why Da Vinci Code, the movie and the book, has been getting more flak than, say, The God Who Wasn’t There, is because it actually dignifies the belief that there was indeed somebody named Jesus Christ who once existed.

It’s okay if you’d just dismiss the whole Christian thing in the same
way grown-ups dismiss Santa Claus. Nobody would mind if you’d assert
that Pastafarianism is “more real” than what Paul supposedly met on the
road to Damascus—but you’d be opening the gates of hell if you’d bend
over, pick up the core dogma of Christianity, and sink your dirty
fingers into its butt and weave a novel out of it.

The faithful
are furious. I can imagine people having the same fury if a Santa Claus
movie fleshed out the idea that the old guy molested his daughter and
the daughter grew up to become Martha Stewart. And who would forget the
rage and mindless violence that inspired the burning of embassies and
the boycotting of sumptuous Danish dairy goods—all because a bunch of
cartoonists tried to equate Muhammad with the high-faluting,
unforgiveable infidel concept of “humor.”

But it’s all so
amusing. It’s fun to hear the god-folk say big words like, “crumbling,”
“eruption” or “battling the onslaught of…” Those are words you hear in Star Trek or the Star Wars,
usually when there’s an empire crumbling behind the lead characters, or
there’s a green blob with hairy nostrils swallowing a girl. Only in
this case, we’re talking about a movie that says Jesus was horny enough
to have been human (or human enough to have been horny) and to have had
a wife. And that, says the nice neighborhood schoolmarm, is bad.

But
I think it’s exciting. To be fair, if anybody would take Dan Brown
really, really seriously, who allegedly once said (I’m using
“allegedly” because you can’t afford not to be paranoid, these days, can you?) that he wrote Da Vinci Code
not to blaspheme but to inspire "discussion and debate" that will
ultimately lead to a more solidly defended faith—all while earning
millions off the little yarn—then the faithful should in fact be
thankful.

After all, Brown himself is a self-proclaimed Christian.

But
you might be thinking, “But you’re missing the point of the protests.
Who cares about that bastard? We’re talking about Jesus Christ having
kids LOL!!!”

This very well reminds me of the same public outcry over The Last Temptation of Christ about two decades ago. And the funny thing is that Last Temptation
author Nikos Kazantzakis was a man more religious than the common
Bible-toter—he spent years and years trying to understand what God
really meant in people’s lives. He actually thought through it, rather
than just accepting at face value the comforting sureties invented at
the so-called First Council of Nicea.

I can understand the
protesters, but theirs is a laughably losing game. I feel that they
know that; that this protest is simply nominal, like those Japanese who
one morning looked up the sky and saw the atomic bomb gliding down and
all they could do was point at the bomb and ask, “Wasn’t that the
Emperor?”

The movie opens in theaters today. Nothing cerebral,
nothing earth-shaking, just one of those things you’ll forget
afterwards. But it’s presumably a good hell of a ride. So stop being
such a grim-faced lot and just enjoy it, okay? I’m sure your God will
understand.

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