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"The Da Vinci Code" was a romp, but what if it missed the point? What if there's a code of even greater consequence, embedded more deeply in the Bible and history - a message Jesus wanted to get through to contemporary Homo sapiens about how to survive the effects of our increasing domination of the planet?

What if "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth" and other calls in the New Testament for humility, generosity and self-denial are not only prescriptions for ailing souls?

What if they also are strategies to weather eons of catastrophes set in motion by human pride, greed and aggression — catastrophes initiated after the development of agriculture, cities and civilizations, when people began overreaching in earnest for the blessings such progress bestows?

What if Christ crafted his message to save not just Rome but also future empires that would take the Roman paradigm to an extreme?

Paranoid delusion? Oh, well.

I've often wondered, though, what purpose is served by the existence of nonaggressive, submissive, self-effacing, long-suffering dispositions among humans — and the armies of the downtrodden these dispositions often sustain. Religions love to pronounce on this stuff.

Scientists have wondered, too — whether anthropologists or evolutionary psychologists or sociobiologists. So do Machiavellians and other fans of Realpolitik, who make a living from what they understand makes humans tick.

The nonreligious answer usually in some way exalts the strong and humiliates the weak. The Homo sapiens loves a winner. We fawn over powerful hierarchs. We don't believe we'll get anywhere in this world unless we can chill our hearts and kick a little butt. The job of the meek is to heed the aggressive. At worst, the meek are fodder for psychopaths — something to exploit. At best, they're wannabes who can't cut the mustard.

Evolution selects for the strong. Even Marx, who claimed to stand for the oppressed — and branded religion as the opiate of the masses — ended up being about who, after all, gets to tyrannize whom.

It's intuitive. It seems to be nature's way. The Homo sapiens is social and sociable but is also hierarchical and aggressive: Deal with it. So few species — manatees, muriqui monkeys, Galapagos iguanas, maybe — are naturally mellow, and they're endangered.

Such stubborn tendencies are what allow Cardinal Lamberto, in "Godfather, Part III," to walk Mafia don Michael Corleone to a fountain and say: "Look at this stone. It has been lying in the water for a very long time, but the water has not penetrated it. (He breaks the stone.) Look. Perfectly dry. The same thing has happened to men in Europe. For centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity, but Christ has not penetrated. Christ doesn't breathe within them."

In Europe, here and even in church, it's power, not meekness, that wins the babe.

But maybe meekness is the new secret to survival. What if "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth" isn't just a pleasant garnish? What if it's meant literally? How counterintuitive! How revolutionary! How would such a strategy play out right here, right now?

It's a weird, unorthodox, hybrid way of looking at survival of a species, from scientific and religious perspectives alike. But it's something worth imagining, maybe, in the face of global climate change.