Mothers Day Surprise (The Da Vinci Code)

For Mother's Day I decided to get my mom the book Inferno by Dan Brown.  She has always enjoyed this series and I wondered what was all the hype about it, so I decided to read The Da Vinci Code.  As soon as I started reading I realized what was so good.  I really liked the setting and topic of conspiracies within Rome.  When I began I thought it was going to be another religion-basher like His Dark Materials by Pullman but Dan Brown decided to not look at religious people as ignorant.  Dan Brown refused to look at religion as a form of ignorance of the truth.  Dan Brown sort of made a great push for religious people with all the criticism they've been receiving lately.  He wanted to show that being a believer in God and in science is possible as opposed to atheists thinking all Christians are creationists.  He kind of pushed this idea in the wrong way but he had good intent.  In the book the Church was misleading the people about the existence of Jesus' descendants (which really isn't true), keeping believers ignorant.  Dan Brown was saying that the Bible isn't a literal book (which Catholics already know) and is full of metaphors.  The book was really thought provoking because this same situation could be applied to our very lives.  How do we know that we aren't being told false truths about our history because this actually happens in real life (i.e. Nazi Germany during World War II).  Propaganda used to be a tool to provoke similar thoughts about a subject in a population which was really no different than the Church making people believe a similar false idea.  The Da Vinci Code was a very fun read because I got to see why it was so controversial when it was published.