++ relapsed catholic ++ religion politics culture blog

But it takes Mark Shea to really really

a) fisk it into a hopeless vegetative state

"Imagine" solves the problem of suffering by euthanizing the soul. Like Homer Simpson, it concludes that the lesson to be learned from humanity's long struggle with transcendent Hope is "Don't hope." It counsels us to abandon dreams of heaven and even the schoolyard impulse to defend the weak from a bully.

It is the song of H.G. Wells' Eloi, the National Anthem of the Bureaucratic World State where the herd are all comfortably numb, having been lobotomized of those troubling transcendent desires that have, for too long, made Caesar's job of conditioning the masses so problematic. As we move closer to finally domesticating the human animal and training him to keep his mind entirely on the bread and circuses of this world, I, for one, hope that someday you will not join them and the world (which lieth in the power of the Evil One) will not be one.

b) fisk an angry letter he got from an old hippie , defending Lennon and the song

The 60s were a decade. They were not the apex of human experience and the generation that came of age in that decade is not the summit of human life.

(...)

Everyone is an advocate for world peace, just as everyone wants to be happy. We can't not will our own happiness. Sin comes in, not in wanting something good (we all do) but in trying to get that good in wrong ways.

It will be replied, "Well, Lennon was not a philosopher or theologian." True enough. Which is why it is so dangerous to take him as a reliable guide or prophet (which is clearly what many of the devotees of the song do). When he wrote "Imagine" he was a naive man spout doggerel nonsense which many people foolishly regard as full of profound ideas.

And the problem is: ideas have consequences. If people believe nonsense, they will act on what they believe. If they believe we would be better off without people who believe in heaven, then (as the 20th Century shows) they will see to it that those who do wind up in concentration camps.

(...)

[Lennon] was advocating, in an intellectually lazy way, a wish that all that stuff would just go away and not bother him anymore. So instead of bothering to find out what causes social injustice, he just wished for a world where nobody had any possessions (except him and his $25,000,000). (....) "Imagine" is a poem by a dilettante who wants to fancy himself a philosopher, but doesn't want to be bothered with the hard work of thinking.