Grateful Dead

Eric Abrahamson At my age, it's already predetermined that I'm not going to go to all that trouble unless I like it. The glass is either half-full or half-empty. Nobody twisted my arm, put me in a headlock, and made me listen to it-I think it's cool. I asked my brother for money to go, and he gave me 2 tickets. My friend Billy "Buzzboy" Rose, "Wavy Gravy's adopted son", used to be a Grateful Dead roadie, he got me backstage at the first show I went to after I met him, so I think they're good to me. My other friend, Richie Shirley, from the Hog Farm, was in the backstage Crew, traveled around the country with them and sold official T-shirts, and his wife, Andrea, "Mom", the cook at Camp Winnarainbow, used to work in their office in San Rafael and they had an apartment there. I met Richie and Billy at Woodstock where the Hog Farm was the Security and the Please Force, so you kids who pan them, fuck you and your worthless idiot opinions. You've never even been there yet, if you ever get there, at this rate. I think they were the best rock and roll band that ever was, and the Rolling Stones was #2, and I've seen them both. Compared to what, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? The technology is pretty good for playing in a stadium as big, new, and modern as that. They can hear everything you say and see everything you do, and my brother bought me a ticket way up in the back. In between songs this kid 10 rows down says, "Shoot him!" and I go, "I have a gun!" and immediately they started into "Loser", "If I had a gun/For every ace I have drawn/I could arm a town/The size of Abilene!" I don't like it when they get that personal, ad hominem, but I'm still a fan, because even if they ever had a bad day, they recorded plenty of *good* days, which can always happen, always *do* happen at least a little bit, and silicon is immortal. Great light show. The only problem is with the critics and nay-sayers, who have pre-judged it all instead of, "Judge not!"--like "prejudiced". They already don't like it, they were prepared not to like it--there is nothing the band could have done or could do that they would have liked or would like. It's against their religion. It couldn't be worse if they sang traditional Moslem hymns to Allah in Arabic. They probably know how. There was a day when *everybody* liked it, even my parents. They were the #2 top-grossing entertainment act for 2 years in a row; #1 was Bill Cosby, by concerts, not by record sales, by word-of-mouth, household names, I remember. Nobody listened to that thing about rock-and-roll being "the Devil's music", and if you play it backwards it says, "Hail, Satan!" In my opinion, the Church rejects dancing, "worldly", as opposed to gospel or spiritual music, commercial music, art, literature, drama, culture, one of the reasons, because it's linked in their mind with pagan religion, which certainly applies to the Grateful Dead. However, I would argue that when the Christians converted the Roman Empire and tore down the Pagan temples, later they incorporated some of the features of the pagan religions into their own, from what I've heard. For example, do they say that the gods and goddesses of the polytheistic pantheons of the ancient cultures like Greece, Italy, Egypt, Babylonia are really One, the Lord God of the Old Testament? Or it says on Wikipedia that the Lord God of the Old Testament was the war god of the Phoenicians, like Mars Hill, though I don't see why not the head god Jupiter, Zeus, Ra, or Aten, where Moses got it. Then the Christians say Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Trinity is One, with Jesus Christ being the Son, a bow to pagan polytheism, but just 3. But they also have the Virgin Mary, who some say is Mother Earth, lots of saints and angels, etc. They say the 30,000 Roman and Greek gods were angels and demons, it's confusing, but some of them were like the Christian God in some ways. For example, Zeus sounds like "deus", which means "God". Jupiter, the Roman for Zeus, has also the name "Jove", which sounds like "Jehovah", which is translated "LORD" in the Old Testament. I read that the Christians used features from the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter, the Earth Mother in the Mass, the table, I think, maybe cups, candles, etc. to attract pagans. Some of the saints represent pagan deities from other cultures, and now they become Christian. The Greeks and Romans also had animal sacrifices like the Jews in the Tabernacle and Temple. Lots of their gods had wings like the Jewish angels, like Cupid, Victory, and Iris, the Rainbow. Maybe Moses got the snake on the pole from Mercury's Caduceus, and Asculepius the healer. The Elysian Fields is similar to the Christian Heaven, and Hades to the Christian Hell. Of course, there are just as many differences as similarities. Online I saw a book by the Church Father St. Clement where he uses Ulysses tied to the mast not to hear the Sirens' Song in Homer's "Odyssey" as an example of successfully resisting temptation, "Epistle to the Greeks". Of course, the Pope and the Vatican have always been in Rome. The Father represents Odin from Norse Germanic neo-Paganism, and Thor Jesus in a way. The word "Holle", "hell", isn't in the Bible, it's in the Norse "Eddas". *Valhalla* was their "Heaven". They mixed it with the Jewish Old Testament, the Greek and Roman paganism, etc. They included some of the old Jewish Mosaic prohibitions. Religion has art, music, literature, architecture, and Greek religion was somewhat based on plays. The Old Testament Tabernacle and Temple had a lot of art, sculpture, music, and architecture, and the Bible itself really is man-made literature. They just want a monopoly and no competition, and to control the State. A lot of art, music, literature, architecture, and sculpture got it's start in religion and then some Christians object for those artisans to become commercial, to use it for money, because they want to control the money, which is also man-made. It belongs to the person whose picture is on the money, who owns the metal mines, the mints, and who coins the money. "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." There *is* no picture of God. Some of the Caesars, Roman Emperors, made the people worship them as gods. Constantine himself was Apollo the Sun-God before he was a Christian. Go figure. Another reason the Church may prohibit "drugs, sex, rock-and-roll, drinking, smoking, and cussing", besides Scripture, as well as art, music, literature, theatre, and culture, science, technology, medicine, "the works of men's hands", the prohibition on idolatry, "make no graven image","bow down to no graven image", well that's another one. *Another* one, "God has made everything sufficient, but they have sought out many inventions." But the Church wants the money that people spend on entertainment, art, music, literature, plays, to go to them. Maybe they *did* think they were all being guided by *God* when they were on LSD and they were deceived by the Devil, "caught in the Devil's bargain", "Satan Himself appears as an Angel of Light to deceive if He can the very Elect," but they were experimenting and they thought they were right. Maybe if you got psychedelic by fasting 40 days in the desert those are true, not Satanic, visions. I think they came true for some of them; potentially could have come true for a lot more. Ram Dass called them "entheogens, 'theo', Greek for 'God', 'God-manifesting', you see God, become One with God, become God". "I am That I am." "I and the Father are One." "If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father." "I said ye are gods; nevertheless you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes." "We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it." The only psychedelic church I ever heard of was the Native American Church in New Mexico, who had a cross on the altar. They converted all the American Indians to Christianity, but they can still do some traditional Indian things they all (or at least some of them) like to do, just to preserve the culture for posterity. People are always interested in what happened in the past; it's valuable information. The price of Indian jewelry has gone up at least 100x in my lifetime, as it becomes more scarce, as they become lost arts, and they were better before the Wasichus came. There's that Jesse Colin Young song, "Before You Came", how great the Indians had it. A lot of pagan spirituality is a lot higher than a lot of Western spirituality; it's the same thing. If you call the Virgin Mary the Earth Mother, or Father God, Mother Earth, or the Yin-Yang, that's Paganism, or different forms of it, generally speaking. Freud in "Moses and Monotheism", says the Egyptian polytheism was better than the Egyptian monotheism, because when Iknaton switched them to Aten, the One God form of the Sun God Ra, he made Pharoah Iknaton at the top of the "pyramid", with all the ranks of nobles, courtiers, priests, and common people. With the polytheistic system, Isis, Osiris, all that, even though it's true what the Christians say, they worshipped animals, crocodiles, cattle, ibises, hawks, birds, elephants, lions, etc., as the Christians say, "brute beasts", power was more diffuse throughout society, less centered in the king. And he says they were more prosperous, too, with polytheism, that their society declined with monotheism, they overthrew Iknaton, called him a heretic, and restored polytheism. That was why one of the reasons Moses had to get out, to preserve the monotheistic concept somewhere else by founding a new religion. He was raised by the Pharaoh's daughter. There are traces of the Egyptian roots in Moses' writings; he uses the Hebrew word "Elohim", "gods", plural, for "LORD God", and "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," admitting they exist, but fighting them, and "Who is like unto Thee, among the gods?" "You're the best!" I don't know; I'm not a theologian. I just had a year of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Yale, and graduated from Mountain Heights neo-Pentecostal Bible College in 1974. I saw the Jupiter-Venus conjunction in Leo tonight, the same as the Star of Bethlehem. It was out for about an hour. Astrology is from paganism, too, and probably the Dead used an astrologer when they set up the stadium dates as a Christian joke, although who knows how forgiving the Christians can be about that. The Bible accuses those who "worship the host of heaven upon the housetops" and they said that meant the pagan Babylonian astrologers. But the Christians reject a lot of other things the Jews said, like the rule against pork. Maybe that verse condemns the Roman astrologers, too. I read that not only were the Romans, and Greeks, into that, but they had augurs, or prophecies by things like the flight of birds, which might signify things like victory or defeat in war, or they'd read the entrails of animals they sacrificed, like tea leaves, or "sibyls" at the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi would prophecy the future in poetry, Socrates had a "inner god" that told him what to do. The Christians say "abandon all that" and then years later when you're "mature in the Lord" it wasn't so bad, and won't really hurt you, "all things are pure to him who is pure", "nothing is unclean of itself", etc. This issue is "if __________ makes my brother to stumble, I will eat no ____________," "Blessed is the man who is not condemned by the thing he alloweth," and something about the "commandments of men". I'm going to write more on another post so it isn't too long.

Hehe gardenamesX2 :) I was thinking just the opposite... direwulf isinmyhead I hope they play it next week!!! Don't murder me I beg of you don't murder me Pleeeeeeeeeeaaase don't murder me

isinmyhead & direwulf