codes and cabbage

Okay so I saw The DaVinci Code. I thought it was good overall, though there were some parts just crying out for better direction. I usually love Ron Howard as a director, but yeah. I liked the casting which I thought was pretty accurate to the characters in the book. The thriller side of the movie was decent and Paul Bettany was scary as in his role as the fanatical Opus Dei monk.

As for the so-called controvesy, I've gotten into it with a couple of people online and I find it all so silly. Suffice it to say that I don't find the idea of Jesus being married at all controversial. It's a belief I've held a long time and fits exactly in his cultural and religious environment, just as did him having a trade or going to Jerusalem for the Passover when he was twelve. As for him having a living bloodline, I hadn't really thought too much about it. I thought it was unlikely, given the doctrine that he had physically inherited the capacity to lay down and take up his life from his father (God), but I'm certainly not offended by the idea that it could have happened.

The people I've discussed it with online suggested that the whole idea is blasphemous because Jesus marrying and having sex would have defiled him somehow, brought him "down to our level" and made him less than he is. These same people argued that Mary, in spite of being married, never had sex and never bore other children after Jesus, and that Jesus' sinless nature was a result of the virgin birth. I find all of this ridiculous. There is nothing unholy about sex in marriage - quite the contrary. We are not "made sinful" by virtue of our mothers having had sex to conceive us, and the idea of Mary & Joseph, a married couple, not having a normal sex life is unnatural, not holy. The scriptures refer to Jesus' brothers and sisters, and while people come up with all kinds of explanations for that, I think the simplest and most logical conclusion to reach is that he simply did have younger brothers and sisters. I will never understand why people are so keen to demonise sex. Get thee to a therapist!

After the movie we walked about a thousand kilometres (or, you know, one) up hill and down dale to Una's, a European restaurant in Newtown, where we ate sausage, potato, and spicy cabbage. Very stodgy, but delicious and feast-like. I felt like we should have been washing it all down with ale or something.