Hello old p-list, my refuge in times of trouble

[barbara100 at jps.net]

> barbara100 at jps.net wrote:
>
> >Isn't there a passage in Gravity's Rainbow to this effect?
> >
Cyrus
> Perhaps:
> "The basic problem", he proposes, "has always been getting other people
> to die for you. What's worth enough for a man to give up his life?
> That's where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always
> about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique -- it
> got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death.
> Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while
> it worked. [...]" GR p. 701
>
> I'm afraid it still works... Sure, one could blame monotheism. But what
> good would that be?
>
> Cyrus

Good one, but not the one I had in mind. Here it is:

"...Do you want to put this part in?] We drank the blood of our enemies.
That's why you see Gnostics so hunted.  The sacrament of the Eucharist is
really drinking the blood of the enemy.  The Grail, the Sangraal, is the
bloody vehicle.  Why else guard it so sacredly? Why should the black
honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire, stone night
and winter day, if it's only for the touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl?
No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to swallow the enemy, down into the
slick juicery to be taken in by all the cells.  Your officially defined
'mortal sin,' that is.  A sin against you.  A section of your penal code,
that's all. [ The true sin was yours: to interdict that union.  To draw that
line.  To keep us worse than enemies, who are after all caught in the same
field of shit--to keep us strangers." (GR 862)