Keeping a Secret as Open as Possible

There is a fascinating book about the holy grail by Dan Brown called The da Vinci Code. It is fiction from beginning to end, but it is fascinating.

The book raises no interesting questions or issues.

I do not mind that Brown comes with inaccurate descriptions of église Saint-Sulpice, or that he steals the lies of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to build up a background to the plot. I want to be entertained, and Brown entertains me.

However, I do object to the riddles of Jacques Saunière. If you have something you want kept secret, you invent a safe code for it - not a series of riddles, which people can actually solve. That unrealistic bit struck me as far more disturbing than the bad prose and inaccurate descriptions of Christianity and the world.