Whatcha Readin'

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 12:42 PM
Subject: Re: Whatcha Readin'
>
>
> I will never understand why intellectuals in the West have such disdain
> for the beautiful religious texts. It's one thing to critique religion
> and/or its texts as a Freudian or Marxist might or as works of
> literature and quite another to claim that religious texts are crocks of
> idiocy. In the West, public education gradually introduces systems of
> thought that secularize one's views. In some cultural contexts,
> secularization never occurs. In such places one can understand
> intellectual disdain (i.e., a Marxist intellectual living in Iran) for
> religion and religious texts. But here in the West, a haughty contempt
> for religious texts is unwarranted. It's interesting that Western
> intellectuals, while they often exhibit contempt for all religions,
> tolerate and even celebrate the religious texts of the great world
> religions excepting Christianity. I attribute this to a kind of paranoid
> puritanical immaturity in the Western intellectual. As educated and as
> secularized as he/she may be, it seems that the Western intellectual
> often maintains a puritan fear of his/her murdered christian god. I note
> this not because I think this is the case with MalignD, but because I
> think it is an an idea evident in Pynchon's texts and ironically (as is
> so often, some say always, the case) in Pynchon criticism.
>

Do we?

I thought we're treating all religious texts as mere fiction, some better,
some not so good. Of course one should have read the Bible, the Qu'ran,
Talmud, I Ching, Bardo Thödol, Bhagavadgita, Tao Te King, the different
Tarot-books etc, if not out of interest for the artistic quality then for
the knowledge what kind of "Ouspenskian nonsense" (GR 30.37) human culture
partly is based upon.

But it should be noted at this point that the interpretation of the holy
texts is the general beginning of literary interpretation.

I have no idea if "The Book of Revelation" is "among the most interesting"
or "the biggest crock of idiocy" of the Bible-texts. But I suppose that it
is, together with "The Book Job" and the Gospels, one of the mostly read
Bible texts at all. At any case those apocalyptic predictions have impressed
a lot of people, artists and others, from Nostradamus (and numberless other
doomsters) up to Vangelis Papathanassiou:

The leading horse is white
the second horse is red
the third horse is a black
the last one is a green

Otto

>
> Dave Monroe wrote:
> >
> > Me, I think it's among the most interesting books
> > therein.  It's simply eminently open to appropriation
> > by idiotic crockery, is all ...
> >
> > --- Malignd <malignd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > The Book of Revelation has always seemed to me,
> > > despite heavy competition, the biggest crock of
> > > idiocy in the entire Bible.

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