On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 2:29:12 PM UTC-7, geoff wrote:
> On 28/04/2022 11:10 pm, Norbert K wrote:
> > On Wednesday, April 27, 2022 at 6:56:31 PM UTC-4, geoff wrote:
> >> On 28/04/2022 4:03 am, Norbert K wrote:
> >>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 5:30:15 PM UTC-4, eagali...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 4:08:26 AM UTC-7, Norbert K wrote:
> >>>>> On Monday, April 25, 2022 at 3:12:36 PM UTC-4, eagali...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> The song "Imagine" resulted from discussing a book about prayer with Dick Gregory - I have a family member who insists the line about "no religion" proves he was promoting heathenism, while my opinion is the theme follows the "Our Father" prayer: the best way for God's Will to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven is to stop arguing about prejudices and possessions, manifest a rational society in the here and now. The full Maureen Cleave article from 1966 noted that two of John's favorite possessions were a Bible and a Crucifix; but wife Cynthia's gift of mechanized caged singing bird struck him as offensively bourgeois and partially inspired "And Your Bird Can Sing" - "when your prized possessions start to bring you down" is a similar anti-materialistic theme as "Can't Buy Me Love."
> >>>>> Your family member has a point; Lennon did occasionally purport to be a "born-again pagan." He had Christian phases, too -- one of which Yoko squelched because she feared it would prevent her from controlling him through the occult. Which brings up the point that he went along with Ono's occultism. And we know that John also had a soft spot for gurus. Like I said before, he was all over the map; he did not subscribe to any one belief system for too long.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Didn't Lennon explain somewhere that by "Imagine no religion" what he meant to say is that there should be no "one religion" that excluded others?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I expect we'd agree Lennon did not wish for an *absence* of religion any more than he wished for an absence of possessions.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Did anyone ever discover the title of the book gifted to Lennon by Dick Gregory?
> >>>> John called his period circa 1969 "Christian Communist," recognizing it as a phase. We think of him pushing people's buttons on controversial issues, but in my book on the "Beatles For Sale" era ("The Quality Of Mersey") the whole group is being interviewed together, and they projected a unified religious perspective ("more agnostic than atheistic" was Lennon's assessment), with Paul and Ringo making some provocative remarks. Paul said, "We probably seem antireligious because none of us believe in God"; Harrison declared, "John's our official religious spokesman." John said that's how most people really feel, with Ringo agreeing, "It's better to admit it than be a hypocrite." Lennon saw hypocrisy in the clergy lamenting the conditions of the poor without being charitable to them. McCartney mentioned the cost of a single bronze door in the Vatican.
> >>>>
> >>>> Paul made it clear none of that discussion involved the actual teachings of Jesus: "Believe it or, we're not anti-Christ." Then Ringo qualified that with, "Just anti-pope and anti-Christian." So there was agnosticism, leaning pro-Christ - but righteously anti-Christian, shared by the entire group.
> >>>>
> >>>> So the song "God" uses the title word to address the typical cultural perception, the concept that placates pain and suffering with the dubious promise of eternal happiness once everything is over. It could not be about Lennon's own personal conclusion that God does not exist, since he described in a 1968 interview that through drugs, diet and meditation he had sensed a Higher Power. What is being disbelieved in "God" is resorting to the victim mindset that effectively allows the oppressor minimal resistance. The idea is the more pain you have, the more God you need psychologically as a coping mechanism, usually for something that shouldn't be happening in the first place. Think of the 'Negro Spiritual' songs borne of suffering in slavery. Pie in the sky when you die by and by.
> >>>>
> >>>> At the time John was completing primal therapy with Arthur Janov, who considered religion madness, and Lennon later admitted the attempt to purge it from his psyche failed. He called himself "a most religious fellow." Even in childhood, John would point upwards and say "Somebody's watching" when he detected mischief; once he walked in announcing he had just seen God.. John spoke of other religious figures who were advanced spiritually like Jesus, with admiration for their simple rational philosophies that few seem to grasp. An interviewer brought up the rumor he proclaimed he WAS God, receiving the reply he had not meant he was "A God or THE God," but shared a fragment of divinity: "We have all things within us," the option of being evil or righteous through exercise of free will. He said the recurrent dichotomy of moral extremes was summed up in the Christ-versus-Hitler contrast.
> >>>
> >>> I remember an interview with Lennon in which he pronounced vaguely that "God is an energy, a power source," but that "I never believed it was any one thing."
> >>>
> >>> Under Janov's influence, Lennon asserted that "God is a concept by which we measure our pain."
> >>>
> >>> Then there were his televangelist phases, during which he presumably accepted the god of Christianity.
> >>>
> >>> And the "born-again pagan" identification came in 1979, IIRC.
> >>>
> >>> Again, I see a guy whose beliefs fluctuated wildly depending on what drugs he was on, what TV he was watching, and who he was hanging out with.
> >> More than that, comments not intended to indicate any genuine belief,
> >> but merely an off-the-cuff comments intended to rankle the other party,
> >> or to engender controversy for controversy’s sake.
> >>
> >> An approach which certainly seems to have worked extremely well with
> >> some fanatics !
> >>
> >> geoff
> >
> > Good point, he did plenty of that. How about Lennon's denunciation of Darwin as "absolute garbage" because "monkeys aren't changing into people now"? Is that what it looks like -- i.e., Donald Trump-level ignorance and stupidity -- or was Lennon courting controversy? (Sometimes audio of this [Playboy] interview can be found online, but one has to dig to find the particular passage.)
> >
> >
> Deliberately 'winding up' people who are stupid enough to think along
> those lines. Imagine the things he would be saying in this era to mock
> the conspiracy/trump/etc rabble !
>

I think JL was too sophisticated to seriously promote Creationism. If you take the phrase 'born-again pagan' at face value it's like the idea of the Renaissance, a rebirth of Western culture through emulation of artwork unearthed from antiquity. Christians await some sort of rebirth, and that occurring outside of the Church would make it pagan by definition. Usually people are deceived by the packaging, and John used this to his advantage, changing his approach (the packaging) , while the 'product' inside remained the same.

Religious beliefs and institutions foster submission to pain and resorting to false hope, that's a song basis. We could make Earth into Heaven if we lived the moral essence of religion rather than practice its dogma, that's another. Those didn't emerge from the same circumstances, but that does not make one the witness against the other, they are both genuine for their respective times.

The genius of Lennon is in how he used sound to process what Christian society professes to revere into a captivating format, so his group was monitoring the unprecedented feedback, while they were picking up on various trends to infuse their productions. It was known at the outset the enterprise could only be protracted to a finite series of stages, so it was never his belief that mattered - it was a test of our Faith collectively. Once the subliminal becomes conscious it frequently is a sound-dramatization of the Christ story, gospel facts over which there is no possible debate.

The basis for "Baby's In Black" was not only a children's rhyme: the colors black and blue in the lyrics obviously suggest bruising. The guitar riff ends with a deep note that approximates the word 'Bruise'; the hidden subtext is the passage in Isaiah where the Messiah is foretold as One who would heal through His bruise - and the variations of the riff become alternated in the instrumental middle section with a unique few bars tonally suggesting,

'...According to Isai-ah,
A He-brew
Pro-phet...'

The two instrumental breaks in the slow ballad "If I Fell" progress from a stilted "Cho-sen Few' to the final ascent implying,

'I Need A
Cho-sen
FEW'

In the film "A Hard Day's Night" John pretends Ringo's drumming could be improved, offering nonsense advice, with Paul offering a ridiculously fast example on bass guitar, whose heavy rhythm conveys,

'EVEN THOUGH
THE MANY
ARE CALLED!'

It is like a mismatched flamenco style, a tonal hidden message for posterity that only further restates what Jesus prophesied.