DAN BROWN'S INFERNO FOCUSES ON WORLD OVER POPULATION

Dan Brown's latest best seller, "Inferno", has all the plot pretzels we've come to expect from this author, and also, as he did in his previous best seller, "Angels and Demons", the confusion of which characters are good and which are bad until the very end. As expected Professor Robert Langdon, the expert on Symbolism in art and architecture and the Art Masters who has a reoccuring role in Brown's stories, has an attractive and intelligent female side kick who gets into the game early on.

Like the title says, the art history focus in "Inferno" is on the artist Dante whose painting The Inferno, and long poem "The Divine Comedy", gave medieval Christians a version of hell.

With an eye always to his books going to film, Brown seems to be willing to create some strong and intelligent female characters and Langdon is always having flirtations but holding himself in Professorial check. There will be no acts of procreation here.

I'm writing about this book for NEVER MARRIED NO KIDS - An Intentional Community because in this book, Brown focuses on the overpopulation of the world and the people who want to depopulate by any means as way of preserving humans as a species.

A brilliant scientist has set up the chase through art and architecture under deadline pressure by hiding a virus he created in a place where it can be carried around the world airborn and leaving clues as to where it might be found before he himself commits suicide.

In this case the means to solve world overpopulation is a virus that will make 2/3rds of the population sterile. The virus changes some people's DNA. As it spreads the infected suffer no illnesses and are unaware they've been changed. It will take a couple years before already living begin to die out naturally and some of the already living discover there is a sterility epidemic.

Is this the compassionate way when the alternative is for so many children to be born to suffering and death as happens today? Is it time to take the decision or choice away from humans since so much currently in place is not having a profound effect and better health care and the extension of life is in conflict with the realities of starvation and disease?

In "Inferno" you'll find more than one female character who is NMNK !

If Brown has an agenda in his writing overall, it just may be the attack on the Catholic Church which he was first accused of when he became famous with his book "The DaVinci Code." In "Angels and Demons" he took us to the Vatican, and here we are in Italy and Turkey, racing around the worlds art and architecture treasures where tourist season is always on.

I'm not going to attack the Catholic Church. It wouldn't be right since the Catholic Church is not the cause for overpopulation. Sure, you will have more children if you don't use contraception. The Church is against artificial methods but not against celibacy, abstinence, or the rhythm method (for which there is now a small bedside machine that used daily alerts a woman to when she is ovulating.) Women of other religions and varieties of Christianity also have many children - think the Latter Day Saints, the Southern Baptists, Hindus, Muslims.  Really, many cultures think women are meant to be mothers. 

The Catholic Church also recommends marrying for the right reasons (premarital classes), staying married (marriage is an oath to God and a Blessed Sacrament), and having children within marriage. It emphasises personal responsibility.   In the ever more secular United States most Catholics are using contraception. And as a nation, though it is being challenged, we are lucky to have abortion as a choice, unlike in China where abortions are forced.

So, if Brown has a thing against the Catholic Church in his writing that comes from his personal belief system, then here I must discuss it only as a literary theme in his work, and in this book where indeed the Church is blamed for some of the overpopulation of the world; he must mean by Catholics outside the United States.

Knowing that you're not contributing to the over population of the world can be nice, but knowing that we may be reaching to point where we can no longer support all the human life on earth and that there is so much suffering is not so.