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So here I am facing another Minnesota winter, looking to expand my mind. Naturally, I turn to 'The Winter & Spring 2006 Community Education Catalog' of the Eden Prairie, Minn., public schools, where I see the very first course offering is: "'Da Vinci Code Historical Seminar -- Did you find the historical events in the 2003 fictional best-seller interesting but too fantastic to believe? Actually, most of the background items cited in the book were tied to events purportedly recorded in history.' ..."
What really made me pause however was this line: 'The Priory of Sion actually existed since 1099, and Opus Dei frightfully exists right here in the U.S.A. today!'
The Priory of Sion ... certainly did not exist since 1099 (or ever), being a 1960s fabrication of a convicted French swindler. Asserting in a public-school program -- even one for adults -- that it actually existed amounts to using the public schools to spread anti-Christian and specifically anti-Catholic propaganda. The line about Opus Dei's very existence in the U.S. being frightening suggests the same, and then some.

Washington Times Link.

There are fine books out there that debunk the Da Vinci Code. We should all be reading them.

Fans of the book want to believe it all happened. I was at the drinking club last Tuesday. One of my friends there acknowledged that the book is fiction, but kept saying, "it could be true." I tried to make him see otherwise and the ridiculousness of saying "It could be true," since pretty much any historical idea could--within the realm of the imagination--be true (Martians might have landed 3,000 years ago, sure, but the evidence indicates otherwise). But my friend just kept coming back to the same idea: "We don't know for sure, and it might be true." He's a nice enough guy, but he simply didn't want to accept the idea that the book is totally fiction. There's something about fiction that makes people want to believe it's accurate. The same thing happened with the Left Behind series. People read it, loved it, then decided--not realizing their ideas were tainted with the fictional story--that it is eschatologically accurate.

Brace yourself for the idiot brigades that will hit the U.S. in a few months, when the movie comes out.

My analogy to an historical Martians invasion, incidentally, isn't particularly apt. Brown has historical sources for his story. Unfortunately, all the sources are bogus. It would be like a person writing history 2,000 years from now and using National Enquirer stories for evidence of what "could've happened."

All that being said, I haven't read any of the books that take apart Da Vinci. I don't care about Da Vinci, and I don't want to spend five hours reading about Da Vinci. If you're like me, you might want to check out this page. It has a variety of reliable Da Vinci materials--some on-line, some that can be ordered.

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