Just about finished reading it. Not a lot that is terribly original in it. It's only if you never read beyond what you are told in church that it is surprising.
The catholic church is upset as despite the lessons of history they still persist in the belief that the bast way to treat the faithful is to keep them in the dark and stop them questioning what they are told. Blind faith and all that.
What is more worrying is that so many seem to think it is factual.
From tombstone's link
The problem is that many of the ideas that the book promotes are anything but fact, and they go directly to the heart of the Catholic faith. For example, the book promotes these ideas:
* Jesus is not God; he was only a man.
* Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
* She is to be worshiped as a goddess.
* Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.
* That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.
* The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.
* Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.
* The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.
* In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.
* There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.
* The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.
* The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.
Catholics should be concerned about the book because it not only misrepresents their Church as a murderous institution but also implies that the Christian faith itself is utterly false.
Like the last bit. I suppose the inquisition was a protestant conspiracy theory? I would be twice damned, as a protestant by birth and a non-beleiver by choice. Actually I would have to avoid the protestants as well.
The protestant churches now seem to fall in to the same pattern of trying to stop the publication of things they disapprove of instead of having enough faith in their followers to stick to their creed and leavethe rest to make up their own minds.
As to whether JC was the son of god? If you believe he was then what others believe should not affect your faith. The idea that stopping suggestions that he might not be will preserve the faith is ludicrous, if it needs such defence then it is a poor faith indeed-if you will forgive an opionated non christian having a viewpoint.
Real history is more bizarre than anything you can make up.
Try these sources
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions ... mary.shtml
http://www.thecyberfarm.com/templars/templarhome.htm
http://www.beyond.fr/history/knights.html
The First Friday the 13th
Philip IV, the king of France, and Pope Clement V could see no more need for the Templars, and they saw a great deal of wealth. On Friday the 13th in the year 1307, the month of October , the Templars were rounded up and emprisoned - "Friday the 13th" has been an unlucky day since that event. Following charges of Satanism and torture-encouraged confessions, the leaders of the Knights Templars were terminally punished, á la Joan of Arc.
In 1312, the order was officially disbanded by good Pope Clement V, and the now-ownerless property was assigned to the Knights Hospitalers, with much of it somehow sticking to the hands of the King Philip ("the fair") and King Edward II of England.
Greed, religon and politics. gripping stuff