Shut up, Cee-lo

By Kimberly Ellington, TFS Member

Cee-lo Green sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” on New Year’s Eve, and he substituted the words “nothing to kill or die for/and all religion’s true,” for the original lyrics, “nothing to kill or die for/and no religion, too.”

My apologetic side told me to calm down, that it was just a song lyric. Many artists in the past have sung this song and omitted the lyric altogether. It was at a large, televised public event, so he might not have wanted to offend anyone. It was also a corporate sponsored event, so maybe he wasn’t given a choice. He might be a religious person, so it wasn’t in him to sing those words.

My positive, activist side reminded me of the words of Sean Faircloth from the Richard Dawkins Foundation, that while altered song lyrics SHOULD make us mad, there are many more awful institutionalized bits of religious bias that we need to fight against, such as the denying of the civil right of gays to get married and the allowance of religious exemptions to our child welfare laws. It reminded me that we need to fight the use of our taxes being used to teach religious-based lies to our children in public schools and we need to keep working to end religious discrimination in our military. Altered song lyrics are irritating, but we need to turn our attention to combat government-sponsored faith-based initiatives and programs that use our tax money and yet discriminate in who they help and who they hire.

But before all that, my emotional, human side screamed at Cee-lo, “SHUT UP!” Before all that calm, apologetic, intellectual thinking, I heard in my head, “Forget YOU, Cee-lo Green! Forget you and every other artist who usurps Lennon’s call to reason. LEAVE MY SONG ALONE.”

Leave my song alone. Leave OUR song alone.

Yes, it’s just a song. But it’s a song that champions critical thinking. It’s a song that challenges society to look around, to see what’s really there instead of blindly believing things to be true that are not. It’s a song whose words speak to many of us as the voice of reason and logic, a song that advocates evidence over faith.

Read. Learn history. Think critically. Look at the evidence. Look at the lack thereof. Test your beliefs to see if they hold up to reason and logic.

Imagine no religion.