The DaVince Code and questioning faith

I finally got on the bandwagon and read The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown. What you have on the surface is a very exciting adventure and mystery tale. Brown packs a lot of events into one twenty-four hour span, enough to keep a reader on the edge of his seat for several hours. It was very hard to put the book down, once begun.
The problem comes when people take a fictional story set in a real place, and begin to think of it as more. Opus Dei, a very real organization, the Catholic Church, and various other groups were quick to take offence. They called the book an outrageous case of slander. Opus Dei even has a written statement on their website, rebutting claims they allege Mr. Brown made in the book.
In point of fact, the author has accused no one of wrong doing. His story used characters set within a fictional version of church, sect and police force to carry through the plot. They chose to take it all out of the context of a story.
Faith, particularly of the religious kind, is dangerous in that fashion. The instant adherents to an ideology see anything that conflicts with that belief, they are up in arms. Of course, where pitchforks and torches were the tools in the past, today it is the Internet and the legal system. There is a campaign of information and debunking, and if at all possible, law suits, to go with anything that questions the status quo. No where is this so common as in the realm of religion and pseudo science.
I bring up pseudo science for a reason. True scientific advancement relies on the testing of theory. That's why it is still the theory of evolution, because there hasn't been enough testing time. (Evolution is a slow process.) We can safely accept the idea as fact, from the evidence we have so far, be we do not call it a law. The same holds true for the theory of relativity. In the world of scientific discovery, nothing is law until it can be proven repeatedly. Pseudo science makes claims and then refuses to have those claims tested. It is expected that people will believe and invest.
Religious faith requires blind acceptance of ideas. This isn't a bad thing, when those ideas are about morals, the meaning of our lives and abstracts. It is when religion demands that we believe something about history, or the physical universe around us that we get into trouble. History is written from a personal point of view, and is thereby flawed, inaccurate. We can trace lineage back to the times of Christ and Mohammad, but we cannot say anything definitive about them beyond the physical evidence of records.
In his books, Dan Brown had used historical groups and individuals as the basis for a good fictional tale. The minute you try to put that into the real world, you open up a can of worms that even now hasn't been closed.
I am not personally a religious man. I do not attend any regular worship, though I do some work for a parish that my mother-in-law attends services with each week. I am, however, a man of faith. I believe in a force that many refer to as God, that created everything that we know. I believe that the truth of our existence is out there, waiting for us. When we are wise enough, we will discover the answers to all of our questions. The universe is merely waiting for us to grow enough to understand.
Science and religion have been enemies, when they struggle with the same questions. That they choose to work at odds with each other is evidence of our immaturity as a race. Faith and Reason are the base pair of intellectual life. Neither works without the other. A person can only go so far on one foot, and he or she can only go so far on faith or deductive reasoning alone.
Edison once compared Faith and Science to a pair of dynamos that he was working with. Unless perfectly balanced, the system didn't work. When in harmony, the power flowed smoothly. Life is all about balance. Male and female. Work and rest. Faith and reason.
Do not ignore the ideas that come from a fictional tale, but do not accept them blindly either.