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"The Da Vinci Code" opens in movie theaters this week, and while most folks are level-headed about the event, a number of the faithful on both sides of the church doors are freaking out.

Not necessary.

The film, based on Dan Brown's best-selling book, is iconoclastic. It professes to prove that Jesus didn't die on the cross but married and had children, etc., etc., and that the Roman Catholic Church is conspiring unmercifully to conceal this.

Some of the God-fearing see the film as an attack launched from the fires of Gehenna. Some armies of the godless and the agnostic and believers who have problems with organized religion see "Code" as a breach in the ramparts.

The film doesn't rattle me.

On the contrary, it's meant to be entertaining, as I suspect it will be. For one thing, it features Tom Hanks, my favorite contemporary male actor.

For another, the human brain loves to make connections. That's one reason mystery novels and conspiracy theories - Brown's book combines both - are so popular. The brain will keep connecting until you make it stop. Paranoia is the dark extreme of this magnificent ability.

Even better than the entertainment is the opportunity the film offers to consider a weighty question: What difference would it make if the church's account of Jesus - his life, death and resurrection - was made up and was very different from the life of the historical Jesus? My answer: Not much.

As the product of an education by the Sisters of Mercy and the Jesuits, I understand the importance the church places on the belief that God enters real-time history in Jesus.

Have mercy, Father Blessin (my high-school prefect of discipline). But for me, the possibility that some eager beavers can deconstruct the story of Jesus takes nothing from the value this or most other religious insights offer Homo sapiens, ever struggling to make sense and sacraments of our lives.

Karl Marx was wrong. Religions with staying power aren't invented by bad guys to dupe the masses for short-term, personal gain. People aren't morons, and they don't put up with such nonsense for long.

Religions are developed by - you could say revealed to - good men and women, who pay close attention to life as it is, not as they wish it would be. They generously build on their own and others' insights, or revelations, over millennia to erect a framework to help the generations understand a mysterious, often brutal universe and the right way to live in it.

They make mistakes - forgive them, Galileo. But they offer a wealth of wisdom that could straighten out the rigidly God-fearing and godless alike.

I'm talking not only about the Bible but also the Diamond Sutra, Tao Te Ching, Njal's Saga and more.

The son of God as a humble carpenter, who honors meekness over might, who dies to live - you can't strip the astounding truth from that, not even with a DNA match.