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The Da Vinci Code And The Mohammed Cartoons

by Doug Mataconis @ 4:08 pm on May 20, 2006.

I will admit that I haven’t read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and I have no real ambition to see the movie by the same name. Its not my style of fiction, and I’ve read so much about both the book and the movie that any suspense that might have existed would be completely ruined. At the same time, though, I find the media’s coverage of the Da Vinci Code “controversy” to be, in a word, interesting.

Thanks largely to a brillantly executed marketing campaign on the part of Sony Pictures, we are led to believe that pretty much every Christian in the world is against this movie. While that certainly isn’t the case, it is quite remarkable from an historical point of view to see almost every Christian denomination from the Roman Catholic Church, to the Orthodox Churches, to Southern Baptists united in the condemnation of the movie. Some churches are devoting Sunday sermons to debunking the central premise of the book.

But that’s where it stops. And that’s where my point begins.

Remember the Mohammed cartoons ? Remember the violent protests that spread across the Middle East and parts of Europe ? Remember the death threats ?

Here we are several months later with a movie and book that, quite arguably, could be considered even more blasphemous than an image of an admittedly human prophet. After all, the central plot of Dan Brown’s book is that the entire fundamental premise of Christianity — the divinty of Jesus Christ — is a lie. In my book, that’s a bit more of a serious challenge then merely drawing someone’s picture.

And, yet, where are the violent protests ? Where are the death threats against Tom Hanks and Ron Howard ?

They aren’t there. And that, my friends, is the difference between a religion that has been tempered by the ideas of Western Civilization and one that has not.

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2 Responses to “The Da Vinci Code And The Mohammed Cartoons”

  1. Da Vinci Code Protests - Pop Occulture Says:
    May 20th, 2006 at 5:26 pm

    [...] The Da Vinci Code And The Mohammed Cartoons [...]

  2. Raymond Says:
    May 27th, 2006 at 3:34 am

    And that, my friends, is the difference between a religion that has been tempered by the ideas of Western Civilization and one that has not.

    I think you’ve got this wrong here, my friend. Well your point is accurate. But Christianity, in and of itself doesn’t lead a person to the same conclusions that Islam obviously does. It doesn’t foster the same world view, whether the church of the East or West. So you could show the film in say Greece, and there would be no wide-ranging death threats. Now there are going to be crazy people on any issue, but on the whole…

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