GR 'Streets' (death and/or afterlife)

[Terrance]

Scott Badger wrote:
> 
> Terrance:
> 
> >Things fall apart. This is exactly what happens in that great novel.
> 
> ...only to reassemble -- though never, quite, in the same way?
> 
> Evolution, baby!
> 
> Is Rapier's "critical mass" of connectedness the *progressive* end-point of
> Chardin's critical mass of Life?
> 
> What if there's no progression? Just change.
> 
> That's *my* faith!

I alluded to _Things Fall Apart_ because I believed that Robert would
make the connection, that is, religions (Herero, Anabaptist, etc.) are
organized, are political, (again, THEIR religion is bureaucratized and
this is the term that Pynchon uses and he takes it from Weber), and when
they clash things fall apart. 

The source of the title of Achebe's novel: William Butler Yeats: "The
Second Coming" [1921], written after the catastrophe of World War I and
with communism and fascism rising, is a compelling glimpse of an inhuman
world about to be born. Yeats believed that history in part moved in two
thousand-year cycles. The Christian era, which followed that of the
ancient world, was about to give way to an ominous period represented by
the rough, pitiless beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. 

Religions are social/political organized institutions. So, when Doug
says that GR is critical of "institutionalized religion" (Doug has not
provides a definition of what this term means to GR and he provides no
examples of such from the text) he is either agreeing with Robert's
assertion that all religions are renounced in GR or contradicting
himself (this is quite possible). While Robert tries to split organized
(he too has failed to define this term or provide examples from the
text, but he has identified the "organized religions" with politicized
and bureaucratized religions ) religions away from some alternative he
has yet to make an argument to support his claim but only returns to the
dead horse example of the army-chaplain and making assertions about the
role of Christianity in war making.  

All religions are social institutions. But religions, even a so-called
catholic religion, cannot, as organized social institutions contain an
Art of unlimited hypothesis (Art, for example, must be permitted to
transcend the morally acceptable, hypothesis outside the boundaries or
limits of the social institutions--government, religion, family...). And
the Arts, in their turn, will always release the excrement, the bile,
the fecund and foul, the powerful acids of satire, realism, ribaldry,
and fantasy as they attempt to dissolve all the existential corrections
that get in their way. 

On Easter Sunday, on some Christian calendars, the Spring Goddess
Eostre, Pasch, Latin Pascha, from Aramaic Pasha, Passover, is celebrated
today. It is a baptism, after a burial in the ground like the Herero
women in GR. It is a celebration of life, of the creative acts of men
and God. 

And, as God says in Faust, he has had to work like the devil. 

For some, the essence of christ, or of faith,  may be discovered between
religious certitude and religious doubt. Perhaps the essence of Art must
always remain in the tension created by these. 

"A terrible beauty is born..."