today : richie cunningham: the devil?

Hello Catholics and religious people everywhere. Just a reminder for you : The DaVinci Code is a made-up story. Surely you remember when you were at little school and the teacher sat the class down and read stories to you like Dr Zeuss or Roald Dahl. It's like one of those, except longer and with fewer pictures. C'mon, you must remember. Didn't you ever have to learn that fiction is made up and non-fiction is true?

(note to postmodernists : yeah, I know that the above statement is really very debatable, but just for the sake of argument let's stick to the true/made up distinction because some of these Religious people don't seem to be at that level yet)

That's why Dan Brown's NOVEL is shelved in the 'fiction' section part of the bookshop rather than the 'totally utterly and irrefutably true' section.

As far as I can gather, this IMAGINARY TALE features some imaginary characters investigating some imaginary stuff in a mixture of real and imaginary up places. Why are you so confused?

Maybe it is just sheer arrogance. After all, your campaign of proving the novel is UNTRUE is predicated on the belief that everyone who reads this FICTIONAL work believes it is actually true. Well, I haven't done a survey but I guess if I did I'd find that almost 100% of people who read books CAN read, and that maybe at least 70% of those people understand the difference between things that are imaginary and things that are true. And if they do decide that whatever 'heretical' nonsense is contained in this story might be plausible then they were probably not thinking about taking holy orders anytime soon anyway.

Can I suggest that you stop wasting your energy and use it doing something useful, like resolving the issue of AIDS and condom use to, y'know, kinda stop MILLIONS of people dying.

Oh, and by the way. As far as I can gather, your Church appears to have survived for a coupla thousand years so far, despite the best efforts of THE DEVIL. So I'll take a long shot here, and guess that 'A Ron Howard Film' just might avoid bringing down the entire faith system upon which the whole of Western morality is based. After all, Night Shift starring Henry Winkler didn't, as far as I understand, turn everyone into pimps.