Angels and Demons is False - Steven

Greydanus
 Angels and Demons is False!
By Steven D. Greydanus
www.decentfilms.com

'Angels & Demons' revels in falsity that Church is anti-science

Brown's historically inaccurate thriller claims persecution of
scientists.

Quick, how did Copernicus die?

Dan Brown readers “know” the answer: “Outspoken scientists like

Copernicus” were “murdered by the church for revealing scientific
truths,” according to a tag-team history lesson by Harvard
“symbolist” Robert Langdon and CERN director Maximilian Kohler
in Angels & Demons, the predecessor to Brown’s blockbuster
sequel, The Da Vinci Code.

On May 15, Ron Howard's film adaptation of "Angels & Demons" -- reworked as a sequel to
Howard's 2006 box-office smash "The Da Vinci Code" -- will bring another installment of
Brown's version of history to moviegoers. The film may or may not repeat the specific
charge of the murder of Copernicus, but it certainly maintains the larger historical context
set forth in "Angels & Demons": the Church's murderous persecution of the Illuminati, a
secret society that Brown claims counted Copernicus, Galileo and Bernini among its
members.

Here's how Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) describes it in a clip from
"Angels & Demons": "The Illuminati ... were physicists, mathematicians, astronomers. In the
1500s, they started meeting in secret because they were concerned about the Church's
inaccurate teachings, and they were dedicated to scientific truth. And the Vatican didn't like
that. So the Church began to ... hunt them down and kill them."

For years, Catholics, non-Catholic Christians and even non-Christians with a low threshold
for rampant disinformation have labored to set the record straight on countless points
muddied in Brown's tales. For instance, Copernicus wasn't murdered by anyone -- he died
of a stroke at the age of 70 -- nor was he ever at odds with Church authorities.

The Illuminati connection is also bogus. The historical Illuminati were a late 18th-century
political secret society, post-dating Copernicus, Galileo and Bernini by, variously, nearly
one to well over two centuries. Their membership were politically minded Enlightenment
"freethinkers" with no special interest in the sciences or the arts.

Anti-Catholic roots