Here is an article on Yahoo about a controversy brewing over the new film adaptation of Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons. Unlike the film's director, Ron Howard, who had this to say about The Catholic League's attack on his new movie, I do tend to be anti-Catholic on most issues, for good reason.
The Catholic League's president, Bill Donahue, claimed that Ron Howard and Dan Brown are "smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales." Wow. I can only shake my head and laugh out loud at the absurdity of a spokesperson/founder of any Catholic organization accusing anyone else of using "bogus tales" to "smear" anything.
Read any number of books on the history of our planet, and you will quickly discover the lengths to which the Catholic Church and its devotees have gone to smear what doesn't expressly further their agenda with tales that the word "bogus" would be hopelessly inadequate to effectively describe.
The Catholic Church has a long history, an ancient history, of misrepresenting reality and creating absolute fallacies, to keep people religiously adhering to fairytales that have only minimal basis in fact.
And it's not like they've been gentle about it.
The Catholic Church has smeared anything and everything that detracts from its agenda, including the use of condoms to stem the tide of AIDS epidemics in third world countries because condoms also prevent new, helpless converts to Catholicism from being conceived. The Catholic Church and individual Catholics may have done some amount of good for certain people, but its complicity in many of the horrors wrought upon our world should not be forgotten or ignored.
And those are not fictitious depictions from a novelist's imagination. Those are facts of reality.
In my opinion, whatever good might have been done by the Catholic Church is obscured by the heavy, endless damage it has done, all in the name of god's love. While human beings are certainly influenced toward "moral" behavior by religion, we are capable of learning decent and moral behavior without it, especially considering the price we've paid throughout our history.
And there are some still paying it.
So Mr. Donahue, who I can only assume by his rantings is completely delusional, can spare me his preposterous outrage over the negative portrayal of his precious church in a movie until he can manage to own and make amends for the very real and despicable things the church has done in reality through the last century alone.
Neither Dan Brown nor Ron Howard could possibly do more to smear the Catholic Church with their fictional works than the facts have already done.
Copyright 2009 Melissa LaFavers