In the name of the Rocket

[Terrance]

MC says, 

GR is about a new religion, or a new form of that perennial
human requirement. The old dispensations were not capable
of incorporating the level of being (and its opposite) made
possible by the sequence of scientific and technological
advances embodied in the rocket, atomic weapons, info
processing, multi-national corporations and the factory system,
etc. Pudding, I think, is a figure for the submission of the
older forms to the strange new half-animate force which is
sweeping away all those older versions of scarcity, and,
beginning to organize society around its own needs.

It's not so much that GR is anti-religious, or that the chaplains
are guilty of manipulation, as that they are quaint- irrelevant. 
They, and the older forms, have been passed over by a new
form of The Angel, and the counter-force, for the moment at
least, is in serious disarray.

GR, as fronted by Von Braun, is a seduction- not a put down 
of religion- but an invitation to a new communion.

YES! 

This is Perfect. This is how Eddins sums it up. 

Opposed to the Rocket, opposed to THEIR religion and to Blicero's is
what I think Gore Vidal complains about, it is Pynchon's Earth-religion. 


   It is marked by mystical and supernatural manifestations on both
sides,
  by the presence of fanatical devotees, and by a drive for nothing less
than
  metaphysical dominance. The stakes are for far more than physical or
ethical
  control; they represent finally the right to define ultimate reality
and to
  decide what the individual's relation to this reality is to be.
Pynchon locates
  at the heart of nature the mystical concept of a living, conscious
Earth, from
  which all blessings flow and to which Gravity recalls these
dispensations in a
  benevolent cycle of renewal. The religious response evoked by a full
  realization of this phenomenon is a variety of Orpheism that leans
heavily upon
  the assumptions of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry in its identification
with
  natural process and its assimilation of life and death into a unifying
lyric of
  praise.


     Dwight Eddins, Gnostic Pynchon