I had wanted to release the Graffiti portion of the website last night, but unfortunately, I didn't. After hanging with my kids for a while, I did two computer caricatures for a woman with whom I work (she asked if I would work on something artsy of her children) and then I hit a brick wall called "fatigue." So I lay on the couch, Da Vinci Code in hand and fell asleep reading. My daughter read the book about a year ago and told me that I need to read it. Then a friend recommended it to me, knowing my religious stance, and so I've started it. I'm not too far in yet. Langdon has observed the body and just met Ms. Neveu (sp?). History is the collective point of view of those who best marketed or offered their points of view. It's not necessarily what actually happened. The subjective nature of memory, screened through our biases and experiences, shade our view. As individuals, we're too small to capture "the truth" ourselves. At this point in history, I think that a lot of people now notice that the version of events given in the media are not necessarily what happened. What they show may in fact be true, but does it best represent the truth? It's an open question. My opinion is that some reporters are good at getting the gist of the facts to us, and others are obscenely prejudiced and too driven by agenda to be trusted. (I did a fairly robust study of press bias last fall during the election and came away with the assessment that the Associated Press has too many reporters who favor the slant of the Democrats - and as I mentioned, some obscenely so, such as Liz Sidoti.) My daughter has a deep fascination with history. I've never met a high school student so fluent with information about history as she is. For her, the Da Vinci Code proved riveting. Early church history is a murky topic in many respects, but the translated documents from 2nd and 3rd century forward are fairly available on the web for viewing. You can start with Tertullian and gobble up the writings of those involved in early Christianity. But I'm quite sure that much has been suppressed. What we know today of early church history is what has been allowed to survive. I don't know that the truth of early history matters much to a person's elemental faith. I don't expect the book to change my own opinions, but like my daughter, I'm fascinated with Dan Brown's grasp of information. | 
