Sexx Laws; WAS: Patrick twisted my arm so now I'm reading Pynchon's latest

[Daniel Julius]

Hahaha, Glumdalclitch

On Nov 29, 2007 12:04 AM, <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

>  Note:
>
>            Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of Charles I,
>            a sect of most pure Puritans. Their central hangup had to do
>            with predestination. There were two kinds. Nothing for a
>            Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast,
>            intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part,
> ran
>            off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some
>            opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute
> automatism
>            that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into
> the
>            Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow
>            those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out
>            into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and
>            fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the
>            glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until
>            there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham,
>            who, like a ship's master, had been last to go.
>



And in regard to the Scurvhamite theological philosophy, see also Judge
Holden's view of the universe and war within it:

"Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives.  Who has
not heard such a tale?  A turn of the card.  The whole universe for such a
player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die
at that man's hand or that man at his. [...] This enhancement of the game to
its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate." -
Blood Merdian, 249

Because Fate is tautologically true and evident, what "argument" could there
even be?  So I don't see him so much as a Satan as has been discussed on
this list lately, but rather the Judge is that "brute automism that [leads]
to eternal death," which Robin mentioned, manifest in human flesh.  He is
Principle moving in a mechanized cosmos, where God has pressed Start and
then let it run w/out touching it or its occupants again.

I believe this belief system is at least partially expressed in strands of
gnosticism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

And if you accept the wiki article's portrayal of the gnostic tenet that "In
order to free oneself from the inferior material world, one needs gnosis, or
esoteric spiritual knowledge available only to a learned elite," well then,
friend, you don't have to look too far to see the implications of Holden's
immense erudition, or the notions of the Preterite v. Elect in GR and
elsewhere.

--
Dan
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