BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Da Vinci Code banned in Lebanon

Father Abdou Abu Kasm, president of Lebanon's Catholic Information Centre, said the contents of the book were "insulting".

"There are paragraphs that touch the very roots of the Christian religion... they say Jesus Christ had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, that they had children," he said.

"Those things are difficult for us to accept, even if it's supposed to be fiction.

"Christianity is not about forgiveness to the point of insulting Jesus Christ."

There is only one valid response to this:

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -- Galileo Galilei