Defending the Faith: John Lennon was wrong, but right at the same time

I was surprised, puzzled and even a bit shocked to see the London Symphony Orchestra and the Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Choir showcase John Lennon's atheist anthem "Imagine" during the closing ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

And that white death-masklike portrait of Lennon in the center of Olympic Stadium? Pretty ghastly — and especially so when it dissolved (decomposed?) at the end of the song. But that's a separate issue.

Don't get me wrong: Sadly, while I attended many California rock concerts featuring such Lennon contemporaries as the Byrds, Iron Butterfly, B.B. King, Cream and the Rolling Stones, I never saw the Beatles in a live performance. But I've been a wildly enthusiastic fan almost all of my life, and John Lennon was far and away my favorite of the four. (Living in Cairo, Egypt, when the shocking news of his death arrived, I felt as if Mark David Chapman had also murdered my youth.)

Still, "Imagine" is a silly song, and, surely, to at least a substantial proportion of those who watched and participated in the Olympics, it's a potentially offensive one. Consider these lyrics:

Imagine there's no heaven.

It's easy if you try.

No hell below us,

Above us only sky.

Imagine all the people

Living for today.

Imagine there's no countries.

It isn't hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for,

And no religion, too.

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace …

You may say I'm a dreamer.

But I'm not the only one.

I hope someday you'll join us,

And the world will be as one.

First of all, Lennon's projected utopia seems … well, rather dull. Nothing worth dying for? No great loyalties, passions or affections?

Living only "for today"? No long-term goals? No aspirations or ambitions? No dreams? No great achievements against the odds? That, I suspect, would pall pretty quickly.

The Olympic athletes in that stadium certainly didn't get there by just wandering aimlessly into the Games. They reached it through long, disciplined, goal-oriented effort. So did the musicians who performed, the cameramen who filmed the ceremony and the technicians who oversaw its broadcast. The stadium itself certainly wasn't conceived and built by people merely "living for today."

Much more importantly, though, there exists little if any evidence to demonstrate that, were religion only to disappear, we'd all live in peace, love and brotherhood. Consider, for example, the historical record of such officially atheistic regimes as Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Castro's Cuba, or, for that matter, of Citizen Robespierre's revolutionary France. Their victims total many scores of millions. And while Nazi Germany represents a more complex (and perhaps altogether incoherent) case, Hitler's dismissal of humankind as "a ridiculous cosmic bacterium" doesn't exactly sound like orthodox Christianity or even theism.