Rhea’s post about the upcoming Da Vinci Code film highlights how an open, pluralist society can deal with critical views of religion in a constructive, healthy way. With the Danish cartoon snafu continuing to boil, small-minded theocrats and Islamist thugs should take note: here is a book—wildly popular and commercial successful—that skewers the very heart of Catholicism. Not only attacking core tenets of theology and dogma, but painting the clergy as sinister conspirators capable of centuries of lies and murderous cover-ups, the book and the film has provoked no murders, death-threats, or torched embassies.

What has it provoked? A cottage industry of refutations, heated discussions by talking-heads, and, as Rhea notes, a website actually sponsored by the film’s production company where Christian experts are given an open platform to contest the film’s allegations. Which is to say, a controversial cultural artifact that should be doctrinally offensive to most believers has prompted more debate, discussion, discourse and none of the violence and fire that those nettlesome cartoons have.

Many of the demonstrators against the anti-Muslim cartoons claimed that the West was selective when it allowed criticism of Islam under the rubric of free-speech but took issue when other religions were concerned. The Da Vinci Code’s success—and the prominence of the ongoing refutations and give-and-take dialogue—is hard evidence that this is manifestly untrue.

For my money, both religions are filled with medievalist piffle and indulge in all sorts of irrational enthusiasms. But it’s a free country, Dan Brown has every right to scribble out his paranoid fantasies in mediocre prose and Catholics have every right to respond with their own fantasies about virgin births and transubstantiation.