Breaking the Da Vinci Code - The Movie...

Reviews: Breaking the Da Vinci Code - Christianity Today Movies: "Breaking the Da Vinci Code is the latest DVD release from Grizzly Adams Productions, which primarily produces 'sweeps week' television specials and series for the PAX-TV Network. The documentary is based on three books from an evangelical perspective: Breaking the Da Vinci Code by Darrell Bock, The Da Vinci Deception by Erwin Lutzer, and Cracking Da Vinci's Code by James Garlow.

The documentary's purpose is clearly stated when one expert interviewee says, 'Mr. Brown's assertions of accuracy once again fall before modern scholarship.'

The documentary begins by summarizing the plot and basic premise of The Da Vinci Code for those who have not read it. However, the movie focuses its investigation on Brown's opening sentence in his book's preface: 'FACT: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in the novel are accurate.' The narrator further clarifies, 'Brown's assertions of fact are central to our investigation of his work, along with the reasons he gave to justify those assertions.'

Thus begins a sweeping examination of the people, places, and events mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. Along the way, Breaking the Da Vinci Code revisits Arthurian legend, the Gnostic Gospels, the Council of Bishops at Nicea, the canonization of the New Testament, the conversion of Constantine and the paintings of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

The documentary also analyzes the origin, nature, and activities of Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion, along with the relationship of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdalene, all of which are central elements of The Da Vinci Code story."

Speaking of Secular Extremists...

New York Daily News - Home - Top prof sparks outrage: "A Brooklyn College professor who called religious people 'moral retards' was elected to head his department this month - sparking a campus uproar."

Dennis Prager has observed rightly that although the term "religious extremist" is common in current ideological debates, the term "secular extremist" is unheard of.

That's because in the minds of Education and Media elites, one cannot be too secular.

I've said for some time now that the greatest barrier between students and the Gospel is moral, not intellectual or historical. This story is evidence of that fact.

Students generally don't believe in intellectual Truth or historical Truth. They do however harbor an inner sense of moral truth.

Students have been told by their professors, and now heads of department, that earnest Christians are 'moral retards'.

Is there any other group that professors so easily and openly subject to derision? Can you imagine using the term 'retards' for any other group and not being fired?

Now imagine that your religious and trying to earn a grade from one of these "open minded" profs.

U-WIRE.com: 10 reasons not to kill Bush

Enjoy the kind of enlightened debate that happens on your local campus:

U-WIRE.com/COLUMN: 10 reasons not to kill Bush: "I've met people on this campus who see America as the worst human rights abuser in the world (unlike the angelic paradise of Cambodia) and people who sway liberal not because they actually know anything about issues but because it's popular.

Liberalism has to be more than a college fad or a collection of loudmouths whose idiotic comments stir headlines. The rabid dislike some people feel for a man they've never even met makes me ashamed to be a Democrat."

This was a column giving reasons not to kill the President. A Democrat cautioning fellow campus dwellers not to kill the President. And they call religious people extremists.

Muslim and Media Extremists: Steyn at his best

Due to the surpassing quality of this article by Mark Steyn, I'd like to reproduce it in it's entirety:

"By my reckoning, just five American newspapers mentioned the name of Imran Khan last week. Who? Well, he's a world-famous -- wait for it -- cricketer. No, hang on: Don't all stampede for the exits, this isn't a column about cricket. He is, as it happens, a beautiful cricketer, the first great fast bowler from the Indian subcontinent and -- whoops, no, honestly, it's not a cricket column. But the point is he's a household name in England, Australia, India and everywhere else where the summer game means the thwack of leather on willow.

And in the same week a mere handful of American media outlets mentioned Imran, over a hundred newspapers mentioned Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. Isikoff was the guy who filed the phony-baloney story about some interrogator at Guantanamo flushing a Quran down the toilet. But Imran was the guy who, in a ferocious speech broadcast on Pakistani TV, brought it to the attention of his fellow Muslims, many of whom promptly rioted, with the result that 17 people are dead.

To date, reaction has divided along two lines. Newsweek has been hammered for being so flushed with anti-Bush anti-military fever that they breezily neglected the question of whether their story would generate a huge mound of corpses.

Which is true. On the other hand, there are those who point out it's hardly Newsweek's fault that some goofy foreigners are so bananas they'll riot and kill over one rumor of one disrespectful act to one copy of one book. Christians don't riot over ''Piss Christ'' and other provocations by incontinent ''artists.'' Jews take it in their stride when they're described as ''a virus resembling AIDS,'' which is what Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris said a week ago in his sermon on Palestinian state TV, funded by the European Union. Muslims can dish it out big-time, so why can't they take it, even the teensy-weensiest bit?

All of which is also true, but would be a better defense of Newsweek if the media hadn't spent the last 3-1/2 years bending over backwards to be super-sensitive to the, ah, touchiness of the Muslim world -- until the opportunity for a bit of lurid Bush-bashing proved too much to resist. In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs -- not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.

Watching the media circling the wagons around the beleaguered Isikoff this week, Martin Peretz of the New Republic described them as ''a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself.'' The media are the message: But, hey, enough about the war, let's talk about me.

As for the wackiness of Muslim fanatics, well, up to a point. But, you know, we've been told ever since 9/11 that the allegedly seething ''Muslim street'' was about to explode, and for four years it's remained as somnolent as a suburban cul-de-sac on a weekday afternoon. Invade their countries, topple their rulers, bomb their infrastructure from the first day of Ramadan to the last, arrest their terrorists, hold them at Gitmo for half a decade, initiate reforms setting the Arab world on the first rung of the ladder to political and economic liberty, and the seething Muslim street gives one almighty shrug.

In October 2001 Faizal Aqtub Siddiqi, president-general of the International Muslims Organization, warned that the bombing of Afghanistan would create 1,000 Osama bin Ladens. In April 2003, Egypt's President Mubarak warned that the bombing of Iraq would create 100 bin Ladens. So right there you got a 90 percent reduction in the bin Laden creation program -- just by bombing a second country! Despite the best efforts to rouse the Muslim street, its attitude has remained: Start the jihad without me. The short history of the last four years is: They're nuts but not that nuts.

Until, that is, Newsweek's story of Quran-flushing prompted bloody riots from Yemen to Afghanistan to Indonesia. To get a rise out of these guys, it took a peculiarly vivid combination of disrespect: the literal word of Allah plus the flushed toilet, a quintessential symbol of Western decadence to the remoter parts of the Hindu Kush. Message to Bush: You can do anything, but lay off of my holy book.

And even these riots wouldn't have happened if Imran Khan hadn't provided the short fuse between Newsweek's match and those explosive mobs. Imran is a highly Westernized, wealthy Pakistani who found great fame and fortune in England. He palled around with the Rolling Stones, dated supermodels and married Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of billionaire businessman Sir James Goldsmith. Jemima was hot but of Jewish background and therefore, like much of Imran's stereotypical playboy lifestyle, not particularly advantageous when he decided to go into Pakistani politics. So, having demonstrated little previous interest in the preoccupations of the Muslim street, Imran then began pandering to it. I doubt whether he personally cared about that Newsweek story one way or the other, but he's an opportunist and that's why he went out of his way to incite his excitable followers.

It's not the mobs, so much as the determination of the elites to keep their peoples in a state of ignorance. The most educationally repressive form of Islam, for example, is funded and promoted by Saudi princes who, though not as handsome as Imran, also spend a lot of time in the West -- gambling, drinking, womanizing and indulging other tastes that even the wildest night on the tiles in Riyadh just can't sate. Whereas most advanced societies believe that an educated population is vital to the national interest, many Muslim elites seem to have concluded than an uneducated population is actually far more useful. And, when you look at Saudi funding of radical madrassahs in hitherto moderate Muslim regions from the Balkans to Indonesia, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they're having great success de-educating hitherto relatively savvy parts of the world.

This disaster took a combination of factors. We can't do much about Muslim fanatics; we probably can't do much about our self-worshipping vanity media whose reflexive counter-tribalism has robbed it of all sense of perspective or proportion. But we ought to apply pressure on the link between the two worlds: the self-serving elites who enjoy the privileges of the West even as they exploit their co-religionists' ignorance of it. That's just not cricket, is it?"

Memorial Day at the McRyanMac House. I put up the flag for the first time in too long. It's a small way to teach my children gratitude for those who have died to preserve the freedom that we now enjoy.  

Memorial Day Meaning

EU just won't take 'no' for an answer: "'In a world that is wholly private,' he says of America, 'we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us.' He deplores the First Amendment and misses government-regulated media, which in the EU ensures that all public expression is within approved parameters (left to center-left). 'Europe,' he explains, 'acts to ensure that television and radio conform to public interest criteria.'"

And they call Bush a Fascist.

These are the people that John Kerry said we need to approve our foreign policy via a "global test".

I guess the U.S. just doesn't conform.

Amen. Thanks to all who have fought, served and died to preserve the First Amendment.

Should we be more tolerant?

Islamic Biological Warfare:

"In Nigeria, faith based paranoia on the part of Islamic clergy, and politicians, caused a polio epidemic, which is now spreading to other Islamic nations. The UN has been trying for years to wipe out polio (which has been eliminated in most Western nations). In the last few years, UN medical resources were massing to wipe polio out in one of the last places where it still thrives; northern Nigeria.

But some local Islamic clergy got the idea that these foreigners and their medicine (polio vaccine) were actually out to poison young Moslem females and make them sterile. Yeah, it'’s nuts, but it went over big in northern Nigeria and stopped the polio eradication program cold. The Islamic clerics finally relented (after the UN brought in Islamic medical experts, and jumped through a lot of hoops), but by then it was too late. The polio was moving to areas where it had earlier been eliminated.

Since you can track where a polio strain came from, it is now known that the "Nigerian strain"” is responsible for outbreaks as far away as Indonesia. So far, there are only about 1,300 cases in Nigeria and elsewhere. Polio is not nearly as bad as AIDS. Many of those infected with polio never know they have it, but they can spread it. About one half of one percent of those who get it can end up paralyzed for life, usually in the legs. Polio mostly hits young children."

A few years ago I talked with an admittedly liberal campus minister who cautioned me about the desire to judge others ideas as wrong. She told me of the importance of standing within my own religious tradition and yet affirming the equal validity of other traditions. It was important after all to be tolerant.

I responded with this dilemma:

Suppose you are a Physician charged with caring for indigenous peoples in South America. You discover that one of the tribes that you desire to care for has an outbreak of Cholera. You have a drug that will cure the disease and save the tribe from being wiped out.

But the tribe's spiritual leader sees your "medicine" as a threat to the spirit forces guarding the tribe. She refuses to let you treat any of the tribe.

You know that without treatment most or all of the tribe will die from disease.

What would you do? Would you "push" your beliefs on the tribe or let them die?

The campus minister responded that she would be very careful.

I asked, "So would you push your beliefs and save their lives or let them die.

She again said that she would be very careful in how she proceeded.

That's all she could muster. She couldn't say what she would be careful in doing, because that would be either intolerant or immoral.

This is why I find the modern concept of "tolerance" so morally suspect. Tolerance seems to have come to mean that all beliefs and cultures are equally moral. And yet that clearly is not true.

So, would you tolerate Muslims who allow polio to paralyze children or would you advocate pushing your beliefs on them and vaccinating children in order to save them from this "false gospel".

Ironically even the UN seems to be willing to "cram their beliefs down other peoples throats".

You might even say that the UN went on a "crusade" to save children from their parents religious beliefs.

How intolerant.

A Christian Blog about Reality TV

RealityBlogs.com: "A blog about watching reality television and living the E.P.I.C. life"

This is an interesting paradigm on evangelism in the midst of pop culture and the blogosphere.

I expect it will become much more the norm in the future.

Da Vinci Code Responses

Quoted on effective web ministry notes: "
"I had never read The Da Vinci Code and despite telling my colleague that there was no evidence in the Bible to suggest that this was true, I felt inadequate about my inability to adequately defend my faith with informed knowledge of the facts that were pertinent to the issues raised by The Da Vinci Code.

...I searched on the Internet for a Christian response to The Da Vinci Code...information was not easily accessible to anybody looking for it. I knew that other Christians must be in the same position as I am, and therefore I must make quick, relatively short answers that could help Christians to answer their critics or to refer those people who have questions to the website with the answers.

I hope to email all of the people who have visited the website with details of Alpha Course(s) starting in their region. I am also planning to produce some flyers and small business cards for Christians to use.

Visit daVinci-decoded.com for his site."

Vonage Calls to Puerto Rico

Orangejack Blog: Vonage Calls to Puerto Rico :: aka Rob's Blog: "You want to Vonage?"

I've been thinking about Vonage for a while to replace my local and long distance service for less than half the price. Here's a review.

Orangejack Blog: PSA: Map Cheap Gas

Orangejack Blog: PSA: Map Cheap Gas :: aka Rob's Blog: "Very cool. Use Google Maps to find cheap gas in your area."

Theocrats punish author for heresy...

Where? In the Bible Belt?

No. Not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

In Europe.

Instapundit.com -: "MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT:

ROME (Reuters) - A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

Fabrizio Quattrochi was unavailable for comment. However, Jeff Goldstein sees this as a 'velvet insurgency.'

Basically, where people warn about theocracy in the United States, we're seeing what amounts to a trial for blasphemy in Italy.

Tom Wolfe once said that Fascism is forever descending on the United States, but that somehow it always lands on Europe. Perhaps the same is true with theocracy?"

And France appoints news reporters only with the permission of the Government.

And Canada can bar the press from talking about it's Government scandals.

How do these countries muster the Gall to criticize the U.S.

Pull the log out of your own eye.

Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco

Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco - Yahoo! News: "It is no mystery why U.S. cities are losing children. The promise of safer streets, better schools and more space has drawn young families away from cities for as long as America has had suburbs.

But kids are even more scarce in San Francisco than in expensive New York (24 percent) or in retirement havens such as Palm Beach, Fla., (19 percent), according to Census estimates.

San Francisco's large gay population — estimated at 20 percent by the city Public Health Department — is thought to be one factor, though gays and lesbians in the city are increasingly raising families.

Another reason San Francisco's children are disappearing: Family housing in the city is especially scarce and expensive. A two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot starter home is considered a bargain at $760,000.

A recent survey by the city controller found 40 percent of parents said they were considering pulling up stakes within the next year."

An interesting factoid. What is the effect on an adult, of a life lived with little contact with children?

We report. You decide.

NYT and me!

NYT Co. to Axe 190 Jobs, Including Journos, at 'Times' and 'Globe': "CHICAGO The New York Times Co. will shed 190 employees, mostly at its flagship newspaper, the company announced Wednesday.

In a statement, the company said the reductions will include 'fewer than two dozen' employees in The New York Times newsroom. About two-thirds of the reductions will occur at the Times, with the rest coming from the company's New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe."

Maybe Micheal Moore will make a hard hitting documentary called "NYT and Me" detailing the immoral business practices of the NYT which led to downsizing and disenfranchising the average joe worker.

How can the NYT live with itself. Do they care more about corporate profits than the welfare of the common man. Let's wait on Paul Krugman to condemn his own paper.

JustOneMinute: Betting Markets smoke out Harry Potter

JustOneMinute: Betting Markets Elicit Inside Information: "British gamblers taking a punt on the next major figure to die in the 'Harry Potter' series allegedly have tipped the odds by sneaking a peek at the printer's galleys."

This is facinating.

I guess money does make the world go round.

The Winner takes it all?

bestdestiny: "
Now, the winners. Actually, just one winner, and here's where I get back to the title of this draft.

Hillary R-Clinton--who has been conspicuously silent about the whole thing. In fact, she doesn't even have a statement on her website about the filibuster, the judges, or any topic related to this.

Why does Hillary win? Because, with the exception of the delusional John Kerry, she has no serious competition for the Dem nomination in 2008. And now, arguably the top three candidates from the GOP have just been taken out; on top of that, count on small Dem pickups in the mid-terms, and it will look like she's riding a wave of progressive sentiment into a momentous 2008 Presidential bid. When, in reality, she's just hanging out in the troughs between waves of GOP faithful anger.

That's right, in the long run, this battle will be about the 2008 Presidential campaign, and right now there's only one viable candidate still standing."

Interesting analysis.

Dennis Prager: Liberal feeling vs. Judeo-Christian values: Part VI

Dennis Prager: Liberal feeling vs. Judeo-Christian values: Part VI: "In fact, feelings are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal positions.

Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that 'War is not the answer'? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war -- from slavery in America to the Holocaust in Europe. Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers making war, not by pacifists who would have allowed the Nazis to murder every Jew in Europe.

The entire edifice of moral relativism, a foundation of leftist ideology, is built on the notion of feelings deciding right and wrong. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

The animals-and-humans-are-equivalent movement is based entirely on feelings. People see chickens killed and lobsters boiled, feel for the animals, and shortly thereafter abandon thought completely, and equate chicken and lobster suffering to that of a person under the same circumstances."

Feelings... nothing more than feelings. Not exactly the basis for a sound moral philosophy.

Foreign Policy: Arabs success in the good 'ol USA

Foreign Policy: Arabs in Foreign Lands: "The Middle East’s poor economic and social performance today has also prompted explanations of some malignancy in the prevailing culture. The respected Harvard University historian David S. Landes wrote in his 1998 book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that the ill that plagues these countries “lies with the culture, which (1) does not generate an informed and capable work force; (2) continues to mistrust or reject new techniques and ideas that come from the enemy West (Christendom) and (3) does not respect such knowledge as members do manage to achieve.”

Such views are common, given the inexcusably poor performance of Arab nations. In the last two decades, no region besides sub-Saharan Africa has seen income per person grow as slowly as in the Middle East. At the current rate, it will take the average Arab 140 years to double his or her income. Asians, Europeans, and North Americans are expected to double their incomes in the next 10 years. The total economic output—including oil—of all Arab countries is less than that of Spain, the Middle East’s unemployment rates are the highest in the developing world, and its literacy rates rank near the bottom.

But if cultural impediments are behind the Arab world’s disappointing performance, what explains Arab Americans’ incredible success? The answer, of course, is opportunities and institutions. Arabs in the United States have access to ample opportunities to prosper and can rely on powerful institutions to protect their civil, political, and economic rights to do so. Indeed, the census data show that Arab ancestry mixed with markets and meritocracy creates a potent fuel for success...

...In general, Muslims living in Europe—of which Arabs constitute a significant proportion—are poorer, less educated, and in worse health than the rest of the population. In the Netherlands, the unemployment rate for ethnic Moroccans is 22 percent, roughly four times the rate for the country as a whole. In Britain, the Muslim population has the highest unemployment rate of all religious groups. The failure of Arabs in Europe is particularly worrisome given that 10 of the states or entities along Europe’s eastern and southern borders are home to nearly 250 million Muslims—most of them Arabs—with a birthrate more than double that of Europeans."

There's nothing sweeter than when The Great Satan suckles you to her tete.

Read the whole thing.

What about the Crusades? Primary Source Edition

Triablogue: "For, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania [the Greek empire] as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont, which is called the Arm of St. George. They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians, and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impurity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them."

Now that's good scholarship.

I wonder if Foofadilly knows about this.

More on Spyware - Kiddy version.

Instapundit.com -: "UPDATE: Ran the MS antispyware beta and seem to have gotten rid of it, along with a bunch of other crap -- but I had to do manual surgery before I could even access the Internet to download the program from MS. (I've used AdAware for this before, but wanted to give the MS version a try; seemed fine.)

Kids' sites seem to be especially infested with this crap, which is particularly unforgivable."