Da Vinci Code and the Victim Pose

Marching orders from the far right, part of the "War on Christianity", etc. Lots of new evangelical voters have been brought into politics and need to be kept activiated, otherwise the radical right can't muster enough votes to stay in power. It's been a very smart campaign on many fronts [DaVinci, "Hollywood" values, etc. here] to get voters into voting booths casting ballots.

It's hypocritical, absurd, amoral, revolting, etc. -- it's fake, it's one big lie. The question is, will enough swing voters get nauseated to the point of hurling [sorry] them from power? I'm not optimistic, especially when the right is allowed to have the stage all to itself.

Perhaps they believe "racism" is being leveled against albinos?

I think the real problem here is that mainstream Christianity is discovering that another form of Christianity, Gnosticism, which they thought they had suppressed nearly two millenia ago, is getting considerable publicity, and so may be on the brink of reviving itself. This appears to be sending them into a real tizzy. Oh, and there is a credible school of theought that at least one of the apocryphal Gospels on which the Di Vinci Code is based upon, the Gospel of Thomas, may in fact predate the canonical Gospels in the Bible.

razib's rule: any sufficiently potent quasi-intellectual sophistry concocted on the Left is eventually appropriated by the Right. leftists in academia are building the future tools that the master will use to fix up his house!

The DaVinci code, although represented as fictional, also claims in the introductory note to be accurate as to all descriptions of documents and organizations.

It isn't.

There was no Priory, the Dead Sea Scroolls were not discovered in the 50's ( and they were concerned with Judaism and didn't deal with Jesus) and Constantine did not "put the bible together" as manuscripts of every NT book are available which predate Constantine.

There are plenty of books detailing the errors.

Its not about a different version of Christianity, its about creating a hype to make millions of dollars in the grand capitalist tradition.

Nothing more.

In their minds blasphemy = bigotry

Maybe we should "teach the controversy".

Excellent snark, Rod.

Going back to the general area of the right adopting the culture of victimhood, I recently read a fine article (which I cannot find right now or I'd link it) about the echo chamber of talk shows and the Outrage of the Weekâ¢. The Hannities and Limbaughs and O'Reillies and their imitators leap on the same stories about a teacher here, a judge there, an academic nutjob down there and an inarticulate congresscritter in D.C., all to one purpose -- to keep the base riled up.

The stories come in waves -- no sooner has one died down than another pops up and the attack dogs pounce and rip it to shreds. I wonder whether the base is developing outrage fatigue, though; the opinion-poll numbers don't look too good for the right.

Christensen-

Of course it's only about Dan Brown making money. The claims in the book are nonsense and anyone semi-literate in history knows that. But I would argue that the hysterical overreaction is every bit the same.

I like "razib's rule."

Christensen
The technique of claiming a novel true goes back to the very first novels. Indeed, it goes back to as far as we can go in storytelling. It's fiction! Fiction can't work if we don't emotionally accept it as true.

Pieter B
Excellent observations, especially the wave-like nature. I suspect outrage fatigue will be countered by finding, or constructing, ever greater outrageous malarkey. Eventually they may try entirely manufactured events with duplicitous "actors".

Many of the very same bloggers who perenially gloat about their "anti-PC" stance have been among the loudest whiners about the harsh and inaccurate treatment of their faith in a fictional motion picture. Surprise, surprise.

I wonder what the Christ crowd would have done if freethinkers, brights or whatever you want to call them had mounted a huge PR campaign upon the release of "Passion of the Christ" aimed at assuring everyone that the movie was bullshit thrown together by a self-aggrandizing profiteer and that there's no independent historical support for practically everything it depicted. There's hypocrisy on both sides of the political fence, of course, but because people in the grip of abject stupidity tend to gravitate toward the far right, the nutter bloggers and Dobson types exhibit such solecisms at a particularly high wattage.

BLAH BLAH BLAH

All this hubbub is just whetting my appetite for a movie version of James Morrow's Towing Jehovah, in which the 2-mile long corpse of God is hauled by a supertanker to a tomb in the Arctic.

Grumpy: someone could also make a movie of Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction, in which some hippie, who had been mistaken by a group of RC assassin-monks for one of their own, finds the corpse of Jesus in a Vatican basement, takes it back to his friends in Skagit County, WA (does this county exist?), and they're debating what to do with it as, presumably, the fascist reactionaries in black helicopters close in. Lots of sex, but probably not enough violence or car-chases for a blockbuster movie.