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Originally Posted by suchandra
If you're an atheist this might be right from your honoured point of view.
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Why would I have to be an atheist to consider that we shouldn't be panicking about something that I'm sure John would care very little about? I just don't see why you guys see this as such an enormous tragedy.
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Originally Posted by suchandra
Since John included Hare Krsna in a couple of his songs he surely wasn't an atheist.
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I'm pretty sure he was.
http://www.counterpunch.org/lennon12082005.html
1971 interview by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn:
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Tariq Ali: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?
John Lennon: ... In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 or '66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit--religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?'
Later in the interview:
... At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness. It was therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pain.
... Well, his thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life--it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.
As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit. All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.
... Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it.
... It's a bit of a drag to say so, but I don't think you can understand this unless you've gone through it--though I try to put some of it over on the album. But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven."
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Originally Posted by suchandra
For him it is therefore rather a tragedy how they garbled, mangled his songs.
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http://www.recmusicbeatles.com/publi...y/lennon3.html
Playboy Interview, 1980
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"The first line [of I Am the Walrus] was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko. Part of it was putting down Hare Krishna. All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen Ginsberg in particular. The reference to "Element'ry penguin" is the elementary, naive attitude of going around chanting, "Hare Krishna," or putting all your faith in any one idol. I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days."
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He disliked religion and all religious activity, including the chanting of Krishna's name. He probably only included Hare Krishna in his later songs to mock ISKCON and it's followers.