Pynchon as propaganda

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> >>>If it's what the chaplains are preaching to the men, and if it's
> what's happened/happening/going to happen to the dead soldiers, then what's
> the point of the passage?<<<
> 
> The point of the passage is not to contrast theism and atheism, for which
> there is no evidence in the text. People of faith do die. The text is silent
> on what happened to them afterwards. It is to contrast Christian faith as
> solace and hope in the face of death with Christian faith as instrument of
> death. The message offered by army chaplains stands in stark contrast to the
> closing images in the section of the Virgin gazing down on the sacrifice of
> Hiroshima. The phallic mushroom cloud has the same 'hey-lookit-me smugness'
> as the Cross.
> 
> The fireburst came roaring and sovereign. . . .


The Virgin,  Virgo, is rising in the East, while in the West, the FIXED
day on the Christian calendar is celebrated as the Transfiguration of
Jesus Christ. It has been  asserted that primitive Christianity was
an-eschatalogical, that faith in another life after death is not clearly
manifested in it, but rather belief in the proximate end of the world
and establishment of the kingdom of God, a belief known as chiliasm.
Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which was not very
precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of tacit understanding or
supposition underlying the whole of the gospel; and it is the mental
orientation of many of those who read it today, an orientation contrary
to that of the Christians from among whom it sprang, that prevents them
from seeing this. Without a doubt all that about the Second Coming of
Christ, when he shall come among the clouds, clothed in white majesty
and great power, to judge the quick and the dead, to open to some the
kingdom of heaven and others cast into Gehenna, where there shall be
much weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be understood in a chiliastic
sense; and it is even said of Christ in the Gospel (Mark ix, I), that
there were with him some who would not taste of death till they had seen
the kingdom of God-=-that is, the kingdom should come during their
generation. And in the same chapter, verse 10, it is said of peter and
James and John, who went up with Jesus on the Mountain of
Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise again from the
dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves, questioning one
with another what the rising from the dead should mean." And at all
events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and raison of
Christianity, was in process of formation. But the resurrection of Jesus
did not presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical
sense. This is one reason why Paul is so very important to the novel V.
and GR and of course M&D.