I was reading the blog of someone I was having a business meeting with and he mentioned he generally doesn't read books less than 50 years old based on the theory that anything really good will still be well known and widely read in 50 years. For this reason he eschews popular shelf busters like "The Da Vinci Code". I guess if he lives to be eighty something he may yet get to read it - it'll be interesting to see what makes the cut as popular literature of the early 21st.

I have also not read the D.V.C. and probably never will, but last night I discovered that I may well be able to get away with just seeing the movie. I think the news that it is being made into a movie is quite old now, I vaguely recall it. However going into see "Charlie and the chocolate factory" (two thumbs up by the way) I wasn't expecting to see a poster for Da Vinci Code proudly pronoucing its roll out in May 2006, in fact I note they even already have a trailer for it online! Isn't 10 months in advance just a little early to be lauching a publicity campaign for a flick that is surely going to be plenty controversial and an instant hit in its own right?

And I do relish that controversy - I'm sure there will be scads of people trying to boycott the movie and remind people that its all just a story. But (if my smattering of information about the books plot and central premise is correct) it will be a great opportunity to spread some skepticism about how squeaky clean the early history of the church is, and will maybe lead a few more people to question, just a little bit, how far organized religion has come from the central premise of Jesus' teachings - be nice to each other and enjoy your life on this hunk of oh-so-pretty rock while you still have it. After all isn't that a concept (of being nice to each other) that should be freely available, freely practiced and also free as in beer? And aren't many of the mainstream churches just organizations that want to restrict you, and tithe you, to practice their particular interpretation of that concept, one that Jesus basically gave away for nothing, no strings attached?

So in my interpretation Jesus was the original free software kind of guy for religion where the source code "be nice to each other" was made free as in free speech, and also free as in beer. That clearly pissed a lot of people and extant organizations who previously off, they previously had a monopoly on such things and were damned if they were going to let people doing their own thang for free. Hence they spent the next 2000 years trying to clear up the problem and stamp out any remaining bastions of free and self-driven religiosity that came out of the original free religion foundation (aka Christianity) such as gnositicism. Religion, they belived, just like air, water, and pleasure were surely things that were ripe for monopolizing and certainly shouldn't be left un-monetized.

At this point if my scant knowledge of the Da Vinci Code is way off then that will all sound like a ridiculously off-topic rant - in which case I guess I can just wait to see the movie and find out what it is really all about. However I hope my concept of Jesus as an open source kind of guy reinventing religion as something to be freely available and free to practice in the face of entrenched and fiercely protective monopolies of power, and belief systems at least makes some sense. And we all know what the result of the struggle was - a few heavily commercialized brands constantly waging a war of publicity and recruitment against each other, something like Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia while their practitioners are for the most part "enjoying" a never ending downward spiral - which doesn't bode at all well for today's free software movement if that is also their destiny.

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