Pynchon as propaganda

[s~Z]

>>>You said at one point that the text "remains silent" (which I agree with,
by
the way) on what happened to the soldiers after death,<<<

Yes.

>>> is agnostic in other words,<<<

No. It is silent. It mentions that some of the soldiers which listened to
the chaplains are dead now. The term agnostic has implications that the text
does not address. For conservative Christians, afterlife is where dead
people go, so they would speak of the soldiers being dead now just as
atheists would. The paths diverge when you ask them where the dead people
are. E.g., If I had asked my father where his dead mother is, he would say
that she is in heaven. The text is silent, not agnostic, nor atheist, nor
theist. It is describing what happened. Soldiers who listened, died. No
surprise to the chaplains there.

>>>but you flatly refuse to acknowledge that this is any different from
what the chaplains, who are not silent on this issue at all, are
preaching.<<<

To say someone who was listening to a sermon has since died, is not the same
thing as saying they died and we don't know what happened to them
afterwards. The text does not indicate that what happened to them after
death is one way or the other. Were we somehow able to check on those
fictional soldiers and determine that they had died and gone to heaven, the
way the passage is written would remain valid.

>>>Agnosticism, which countenances the non-existence of God, redemption,
salvation &c (i.e. it countenances
*atheism*) as a possibility, is *not the same thing* as Christian belief,<<<

This view is not present in the text. The soldiers could be in heaven, and
the text still reads just fine.

>>>Ergo, the way the text tells it is quite at odds with the chaplains on
the subject of what happened/will
happen to the soldiers, and this is the discrimination upon which the tone
and the semantic content of the passage hinges.<<<

I seriously doubt that any army-chaplain has ever suggested that any soldier
is not going to die. There is no internal contradiction between the text and
the chaplains. The fact that the text does not address afterlife when
mentioning that soldiers have died does not set up a contrast between
atheism/agnosticism and faith, it emphasizes the reality of death which is
the context of the chaplain's work, and which chaplains are as certain about
as any atheist or agnostic.