The Fall of Christendom!(?)

Apparently the fiction of the Davinci Code conflicts with the fiction of traditional Christianity and that has many clerics and charlatans in a spittle-throwing fit.

Perhaps what is really disturbing is that the Code, however fallacious the underlying facts of the story may be, is tour of the theological kitchen as the sausage of faith is being made.

The many forms of Christianity, as we know them today, followed a Darwinian path of evolution through societies, belief systems, enthusiasms, traditions, and leaders. Early synods and councils of the powerful assembled to determine what would be canonized as scripture, who could do what when and where with whom, and incorporated pagan rites into the Christian calendar. Christmas, Easter and the minor Christian holy days didn't spring, fully formed, from the earth, powerful people decided when and how they would be celebrated. Likewise black leather bound Bibles aren't picked from groves of magical trees; people print them on machines and people decided what should be in them.

This tenuous structure relies on faith in divine intervention in the affairs of humankind stripping away biases, tempering influences and clarifying core principles. A more likely scenario is that Christianity was formed and is maintained by powerful people channeling the powerful influences of fear, desire, guilt and prestige. I do not intend to suggest that this is a vast conspiratorial network of premeditated deception but just the haphazard way history and traditions are shaped.

In the end it may be that what is really threatening about the Code is not the 'facts' behind the story, but the nature of the story itself; what we consider sacred and divine was created not by God, but by ourselves and its plausibility rests only in ignorance of its origins.