“It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. Alas, it is worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they believe in anything.” –G. K. Chesterton

By changing the lyrics of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, Hip-Hop Rapper Cee Lo Green (of Gnarls Barkley fame) helped make clear that John Lennon’s biggest hit is tosh

Something big, round and heavy fell with a clang in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and it wasn’t the ball on the flagpole. Cee Lo Green sang a version of Imagine in which he changed John Lennon‘s lyric “and no religion, too” to “and all religion is true”.

Outraged Lennon fans didn’t need to use 132 of their Twitter characters to tell Cee Lo what they thought of him. On the other hand, perhaps they were just reminding him of his most infamous song title.

Among the New Year’s Day tweets, I imagine there were one or two that said, in effect, don’t you think you’re taking postmodernism a bit far? To which Cee Lo responded: “Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that’s all.”

Things really started to get bizarre when the fans accused him of blasphemy and sacrilege. “We do not take kindly to blasphemers like Mr Green. He must be boiled in oil for his apostasy!”

Woah! First of all, the punishment for apostasy is, of course, stoning. Second, aren’t we taking things a bit too seriously here? Is Imagine a sacred text?

This is yet another sign of what happens when people abandon formal religion. GK Chesterton gets quoted more than he gets read these days, but he anticipated the present age: “It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. Alas, it is worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they believe in anything.”

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