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Songs of Love and Hate is maybe his "darkest" album but one of my favourites, perhaps because it's the first one I ever bought.
( the second one being "Death of a Ladies man" I have never heard an album of any artist in which the producers influence is so strongly present ) You should try a live-album John, I can recommend you the "Field Commander Cohen Tour of 1979"
album which has a very warm atmosphere. Good luck on your journey !

Remi

Casey Butler wrote: Jesus was quoting David, Psalm 82. David is paraphrasing God as saying:
"I have said, Ye (are) gods; and all of you (are) children of the most High."
...Which in Genesis actually reads:
"Behold, the man is become as one of Us, to know good and evil..."

God wrote: Genesis 3:4
And the serpent said unto the woman,
Ye shall not surely die:
3:5
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof,
then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods,
knowing good and evil.

You Shall Be As Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition.

from
http://www.soulcare.org/Bible%20Studies ... Deity.html
...
- Dr. Lucifer is alive and well. Erich Fromm, one of the founding fathers
of modern psychotherapy wrote many books and articles that had a powerful
influence on the mindset of our current culture, especially the concepts
of self-love and self-esteem. One of his books was entitled:
YOU SHALL BE AS GODS: A RADICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE
OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS TRADITION.
- Robert Schuller and other psychologized preachers began to absorb
these "new" teachings from the field of psychotherapy and like a
Trojan Horse the lies of Lucifer have invaded the church.
- M. Scott Peck, M.D., author of the phenomenally successful,
yet heretical bestseller, THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED, and his latest,
BEYOND THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED, promotes the lie of
"Process Theology" = God is changing & evolving.
Heb 13:8 says God is immutable, unchanging, the one and only I AM.
- Mormon Heresy: "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become".
...

from JEWS and the AMERICAN SOUL,
Human Nature in the Twentieth Century,
- Andrew R. Heinze,
Princeton University Press
(c) 2004 by Andrew R. Heinze

pgs 281-283
...
In the work that most fully elaborates his humanism of relatedness,
The Art of Loving, Fromm betrays how deeply the Judaism of his youth
saturated the values of the atheist adult. Published in 1956,
The Art of Loving went through twenty-nine printings and sold a million
and a half copies in English by the end of the 1960s. (By 2000, the book
had sold 25 million copies in fifty languages.) Such success was impressive
for a Marxist critique of American emotional life that appeared at the height
of the Cold War. "In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails,
and in which material success is the outstanding value," Fromm declared,
"there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow
the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the
labor market." The art to which he referred was seldom seen, and
developed only by people who possessed what Fromm called a
"productive orientation," a concept he first elaborated in
Man for Himself (1947). In contrast to those personality types
that fulfilled the most venal tendencies of a capitalist economy,
the "productive" type sought "relatedness in all realms of human
experience." The productive type, that is, the mature person,
also had a healthy self-regard or self-love. Echoing Joshua Liebman's
motif in Peace of Mind, Fromm objected to Christian indictments
of self-love and argued that "the idea expressed in the Biblical
'Love thy neighbor as thyself!' implies that respect for one's own
integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one's
own self, cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding
for another individual."

As he moved through his argument about the nature of mature love
and its evolution in Western history, Fromm drew on his Jewish education
and placed himself in a line of radical Jewish thinkers whom he deemed
the true inheritors of the Jewish spirit. He married Maimonides to Freud
in order to criticize the infantile conception of God to which, in his view,
most people adhered. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides
discoursed on the problems of anthropomorphizing God and insisted
that God could not be identified by adjectives (e.g., wise, just) that
applied to people. Freud, for his part, thought that God was a projection
of neurotic needs for a father figure. Fromm also objected to such
diminished conceptions of God, but he parted from Freud by favoring
the attitude of "the truly religious person" who "follows the essence
of the monotheistic idea ... knowing that he knows nothing about God."
Having established the unknowability of God. Fromm went on to argue:
"The love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the
thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness
with God.. .. This leads to the emphasis on the right way of living."
He then claimed that Eastern religions (Taoism, Buddhism. Hinduism)
and also Judaism exemplified that approach, whereas Christianity
(except for Meister Eckhart, his favorite mystic) did not. because
it elevated thought over action and belief over deed. "The emphasis
of the Jewish religion was . . . on the right way of living, the Halacha."
Fromm explained, "In modern history, the same principle is expressed
in the thought of Spinoza, Marx and Freud." In Western culture, then,
the truest source of a mature rather than infantile love of God, and
a mature practice of love as human relatedness, was Judaism and
those visionary Jews to whom Fromm looked for inspiration.

That Fromm's humanism had deep Jewish roots became startlingly
clear in You Shall Be As Gods(1966), which was subtitled
A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition,
Although the book elaborated an argument already present in
The Art of Loving, here Fromm finally brought the old apparatus
of rabbinic exegesis out of the closet into which he had put it at
age twenty-seven, dusted it off, and produced a thoroughly original
piece of writing: a brief for humanism composed for the general reader
and based on a sophisticated Jewish analysis of the Bible with
many detailed references to Talmudic and rabbinic commentaries.
He argued that the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic Judaism contained
the seeds of a grand and radical humanist tradition in Western thought.
The Bible showed a "remarkable evolution from primitive authoritarianism
and clannishness to the idea of the radical freedom of man and the
brotherhood of all men." Moreover, the entire Jewish tradition from the
Pharisees through the Hasids promoted a belief in the human being as
an unfolding personality commanded to "be holy" as God is holy. As
Joshua Liebman had stressed the Jewish concept of people being in
partnership with God, Fromm affirmed the same idea but with a rich array
of midrashic prooftexts illustrating the remarkable boldness that the
God of the rabbis seemed to accept from mere humans. ("Man is not
God, but if he acquires God's qualities, he is not beneath God, but walks
with him.") Most important, Fromm contended, the Hebrew Bible
established unequivocally that people, in serving the one God, should
never reduce themselves to serving men. By liberating human beings from
"incestuous" ties to land and blood, obedience to God placed them on a
path of "imitating" the divine attributes of mercy and justice. "Man, the
prisoner of nature, becomes free by becoming fully human. In the
biblical and later Jewish view, freedom and independence are the goals of
human development, and the aim of human action is the constant process
of liberating oneself from the shackles that bind man to the past, to nature,
to the clan, to idols."


You Shall Be As Gods was intended both as an apologetic text for
the tradition that Fromm loved and as a kind of guide for the perplexed
humanist, both the religious humanist and the "non-theistic humanist"
(as he called himself) who needed "the experiential reality" behind the
idea of God if not God per se. He opened with the old Jewish complaint
about Christian misrepresentations of the Torah as a nationalistic book
focused on an angry and vengeful God. "Among most Christians the
Old Testament is little read in comparison with the New Testament,"
he observed. "Furthermore, much of what is read is often distorted by
prejudice." Fromm then gave his readers a short grand tour through the
postbiblical Jewish tradition, including an autobiographical account of
his own rich education in the sources of Judaism. Paying homage to the
three great rabbis who instructed him. he explained. "Not being a practicing
or a 'believing' Jew, I am, of course, in a very different position
from theirs... Yet my views have grown out of their teaching, and it is
my conviction that at no point has the continuity between their teaching
and my own views been interrupted."

In part, Fromm wanted to reconnect secular Jewish idealists with the
"revolutionary" principles of their ancestors. He believed that "the
universalism and humanism of the prophets blossomed in the figures of
thousands of Jewish philosophers, socialists, and internationalists, many
of whom had no personal connection with Judaism." And, having
reached his sixties, he was prepared to reflect on the possibility that the
halakhah, and the observance of the Sabbath in particular, might contain
valuable lessons and methods for the struggle to affirm life in a society
that turned people "into appendices of machines." The sanctification of
all activity on the Sabbath was an antidote for the poisons of modern
society; it was an incarnation of the humanist ethic. "I do believe that
the principle of the Sabbath rest might be adopted by a much larger
number of people—Christians. Jews, and people outside of any religion.
The Sabbath day. for them, would be a day of contemplation, reading,
meaningful conversation, a day of rest and joy, completely free from all
practical and mundane concerns."
...

God wrote:
Genesis 3:4
"And the serpent said unto the woman,
Ye shall not surely die:
3:5
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof,
then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods,
knowing good and evil."


Greg: That's always been one of my favorites, because it clearly states that "the original sin"
was "the knowledge of good and evil".

Or, in other words, criticism, was the original sin.

Critics are evil.

When, a few years ago, I calculated that it might be good for my reputation
if I joined a community group, I considered only two religions. And Judaism
was one of them. Mainly because of that book.

(The other was Unitarianism. Mainly because a little UU group
had formed in town. But then they moved out of town, and I
had to give up the whole idea. My reputation is mud.)

Gregor: John,
Try 'Dear heather,and Ten new Songs ' they are leonard at his best but his very best and his has given some of his music to Anjani .If Leonard is the voice of gog try Anjani She has the voice of the angles ,also there is The BOOk OF LONGING.
Rgeards
Gregor.

John Etherington wrote:In the light of these ideas, I would like to consider Leonard's "Avalanche", which I have always found compelling but difficult to understand lyrically.