SHJIHM :: Passion of The Christ :: Angels and demons ~ Runboard
"There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church, which is, of course, quite a different thing." -Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
Placating terrorists, meeting with dictators, compassion for murderers... but no humanity for the unborn... incredible.
OOT
Angels and demons This time we get an antimatter-wielding and suicidal carmelengo/Pope who receives visions from the enemy and is the result of the union betwen the former Pope and a nun via IVF (he still gets buried in consecrated ground) commanding the unholy hashashin - more gore than the puny albino monk from the first movie.
Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.
Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)
But Brown doesn’t have the soul of a true-believing Enemy of the Faith. Deep down, he has a fondness for the ordinary, well-meaning sort of Catholic, his libels against their ancestors notwithstanding. He’s even sympathetic to the religious yearnings of his Catholic villains — including, yes, the murderous albino monks.
This explains why both “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” end with a big anti-Catholic reveal (Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene! That terrorist plot against the Vatican was actually launched by an archconservative priest!) followed by a big cover-up. A small elect (Tom Hanks and company, in the movies) gets to know what really happened, but the mass of believers remain in the dark, lest their spiritual questing be derailed by disillusionment and scandal. Having dismissed Catholicism’s truth claims and demonized its most sincere defenders, Brown pats believers on the head and bids them go on fingering their rosary beads.
Re: Angels and demons I will debate myself with quotes from other people.
quote:
It’s an intelligent thought that has only one defect, namely that of being wrong. Brown really is a malignant, anti-religious peddler of intellectual smut — and that is precisely why people of real but poorly-informed faith devour his dreadful prose.
Re: Angels and demons I am definitely glad that this movie is not stirring up the storm that the last one did. I quite enjoyed the book, to be honest. There were actually a few really powerful messages endorsing religion, as far as I could see. But then, I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, and try not to judge.
Why do you think these books raise such controversy? It IS fictional, after all. We know that it never happened.
In fact, I would think we would be understanding, particularly wtih how many people would say similar things about church teachings - that they deliberately mislead people, much to their detriment.
My thought is that if someone is swayed by such a book, then they were going to be swayed anyhow. It is simply a catalyst.
Re: Angels and demons If they are controversial it is because a lot of people believe the back story regardless of the fictionality of the main characters and specific events. Dan Brown and his publisher encourage that kind of thinking with a very clever marketing campaign.
Re: Angels and demons And, as stated, if people fall prey to such things, they clearly had doubts in the first place... I would think that Christians would have loved this book/story in comparison to the davinci code, either way. Yes, it says that corruption and the like are possible within the Vatican - we already know that that IS true. It also shows a mix of science and religion that is plausible...
