Oooo

I had a good birthday, I'll post about that a little later :)

I was reading Mark Shea's blog, when I came upon this little gem: 60 Minutes does a debunking of Dan Brown's little legend.

Ed Bradley, you're my hero! Well, not quite.

There was an interesting letter-to-the-editor in one of the local papers which basically blasted all the people concerned about the Da Vinci Code. "Why is the Church so worried about people thinking? It's just a work of fiction, etc!" was the gist of it.

My reply: Have you had much to do with the human race lately? Plenty of ill-read, poorly-educated individuals will read the Da Vinci Code and think that it is historically accurate. These are the same individuals who not only wouldn't ever pick up a scholarly treatise on exegesis or the history of late antiquity, but would also not know what the Dead Sea Scrolls are and what they have to do with anything. They are good people, they have busy lives and families, they work hard during the day, and frankly, they don't have enough free time, let alone the inclination, to really pursue the life of the mind. A few-hundred-page mystery novel is just about what they're intellectually "up for."

I KNOW PEOPLE LIKE THIS. They think the Da Vinci Code is just the coolest thing ever. It's frustrating, because you don't know where to begin educating them. You'd have to really begin at the beginning. This must be how the Catholics in the South feel when the really fundamentalist Bahhhhble-Believing Sola Scriptura Christians start in on them. I imagine that it's sometimes a bit of a struggle to get them to realize and accept that the Gospels were originally written in Greek, and not in King James' English.