Danny ChaiOne Friday night a few months ago around 1:30 AM, I start reading the DaVinci Code. I don’t stop. I read it straight through until Saturday 7:30 AM. Totally exhausting, but yeah, it’s a pretty good page-turner. Vaguely Michael Crichton-esque, in terms of the research and how the smart people in the book snootily share their knowledge. It’s pretty good.
And fairly heretical. But whatever, it doesn’t take a lot of research to find out the book’s inaccuracies.
It did remind me of something that bothers me about this relativist post-modern age we live in. And that’s the thought that every idea has equal merit. Doesn’t matter what belief system you have, they’re all equally valid. It’s an absurd idea. If a belief system goes around insisting that 2=5, it’s obviously, practically, empirically false, so it can’t be equally valid with a system that matches reality. Different systems may each have a bit of truth in them, but that doesn’t make them equally valid.
Anyway, when you read modern scholars getting all excited about the discovery of ancient Gnostic texts, they tend to have that common presupposition, that all alternative beliefs are equally valid. The Davinci Code goes ridiculously further, saying that *only* the Gnostic beliefs are true, and historical Christianity is all built on falsehood.
I dunno, that makes me angry. There have always been competing ideas within (and without) Christianity. Always will be. Some would have you believe that the ideas that won out succeeded just as a mistake of history, they were no more (or definitely less, according to Davinci Code) true than the ideas that lost.
I dunno, I happen to believe that there’s power in truth. Truth lends endurance to ideas. Ideas that last for a long time may or may not be true. But known ideas that don’t last, I think that says something about how true they are. There’s a certain power in truth.
Anyway, yeah, I worry about people who take the DaVinci Code too seriously. Like I heard Ricky Williams wanted to talk about its claims with his agent? Cuckoo. I dunno, it’s a Michael Crichton novel. Entertaining. But about as “true” as Jurassic Park.