V-2: 3 Heresy, p 82

[Robin Landseadel]

	The Lord's angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the
	Lord's Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only
	twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has
	no voice. If the Koran were nothing, then Islam was nothing.
	Then Allah was a story, and his Paradise wishful thinking.

I've never really delved into V. as I [still] find the dialogue the  
very worst of all in Pynchon's novel's. But I also realize that the  
child is father to the man and many elements that I find fascinating  
in Pynchon's work appear here for the first time. Seeing as we have so  
many characters in V. who have moved beyond belief into overt  
rejection of the faith of their fathers, it's interesting to note this  
passage of deep heresy early on in a book that features a 1001 nights  
of heresies. While Alice and others obsess almost exclusively on  
Gnosticism in TRP, I suspect that the author's predilection for  
heresy, allsorts, derives from family history. Alice notes Hawthorne,  
though I suspect that "Meritorious Price" and "Pynchon v. Stern"  
probably have more to do with Pynchon's generous distribution of  
displays of both heresy and land rape.