The DaVinci ... What?

When I was a kid growing up in the city of Hamilton, Ontario I used to hear it often said when some questionable material was introduced onto the market place, especially in terms of literature, "well, if they want it to sell, it should first of all be 'banned in Boston'". I never quite understood that until later it life when certain questionable books found their way into public book stores with the interesting publicity to wit, "this book has been banned ...", and then certain places were named. It seemed thereafter that everyone wanted to get hold of a copy and see what all the fuss was about.

As a teenager I worked in a movie theatre for a year and while I was not yet eighteen, the movie came out while I was there which was the first "Restricted" film ever called "Peyton Place". I was staff so I was not kept out and like so many of my age group (not to mention thousands of others) we could hardly wait to see the juicy bits. By today's standards, if that word can still be used, I have seen racier television commercials! Still, the restricted label did the trick and it became one of the all time most viewed films for the day.

Since that time of course there have been a great many films with the "R" rating. It doesn't seem to carry much weight any more as far as getting more people to watch. In point of fact there are many films out there with a much lower rating that probably should have this particular rating and don't. Now, why mention all of this when I have set down the title which relates specifically to a book titled "The DaVinci Code"?

Well without getting into all of the specifics of what this book doesn't really say, I have found it rather disappointing to see how many evangelical and even Reformed brethren have jumped on the band wagon to condemn it for all that it purports. Of course the book is nonsense. I believe all born again Christians will attest to this. So why not just leave it at that? Why spend literally thousands of man hours writing articles and books and pamphlets to counteract pure, unadulterated trash? In point of fact all this is doing is "banning it in Boston". It's feeding its popularity. In a sense it is a bit like what took place in the final year of the last century that became popularly known as "Y2K". Hundreds of authors of all stripes both knowledgeable and otherwise threw up the proverbial hue and cry with great wailing and lamenting warning people that their economic world was about to collapse. Strange. For on January 1, 2000 ... everything was as it had been. No collapse.

A few months after the film on this book has been released, and seen by the masses, it will be pushed quietly into history. And as they say in the newspaper jargon - that's "30".