giaman,
What is Lonnon saying, "I don't believe in Buddha" ...but then he says that when the dream is over; "But now I'm reborn. I was the Walrus; But now I'm John and so dear friends you'll just have to carry on. The Dream is over"

Isn't the song an alluding here to a Buddhaist dreaming view of reincarnation?

Are there multiple recordings of the song, or are you editing? My version has: "I just believe in me -- Yoko and me -- and that reality."

Peter,
I don’t object to you having faith but when it is such a blind faith then it becomes dangerous, inciting, and scary.

You claim, “The desire for universal peace and justice is admirable but you cannot get there by ignoring the particular such as the United Nations found when their troops were relegated to being observers of genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans….”

Let me enlighten you on some of the particulars. Rwanda is one of the most highly Christianised nations in Africa (87%) which pre-genocide missionary groups held as example of what could be achieved through evangelicalism, but where trials are still going on for the priests, bishops, and nuns who blasted their hate from the pulpit. Rwanda can hardly support your claim “Where the gospel has taken hold, we find ordered communities”. These were Christians fighting Christians.

As for the Balkans, this is where Serbians troops leaving razed and brutalised Moslem villages raised a three fingered salute in triumph; it symbolised the father, son, and the Holy Ghost. Christianity runs so deep through this country that recently, for a short time at least (much to the delight of our Christian right),outlawed the teaching of evolution in its schools.

Rather than doctrinise Christ teachings could I instead invite you to follow the example he set. When the woman from Canann first came to Christ to ask his help for her ailing daughter he would not even talk to her, when she tried again he, in what most would consider a racial slur said “It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs” And she said, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.” Then Jesus answered and said unto her, “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.”

In recognising her faith and humility despite her objectionable status Christ made the first tentative steps toward universality, I invite you to strive for more of the same rather than less

The world is flat!
Get over it Peter and the rest of the GB's your imaginary god (the one lurks in the shadows of our ignorance) world is getting smaller and smaller. This is a rerun of the pathetic notion that GB's like to put about, “that without a god then there is no foundation for our morals”. What a load of crap, it just highlights the superiority complex that religious types have and reveals one of the fundamental flaws that attracts them to religious belief. Our moral codes are formed in the same way as every other animal on this planet. A mixture of nature and nurture with the basic's laid down in our DNA and the details passed on in memes. That’s why all cultures of the world pretty much share the same basic moral codes. Christianity is just another primitive attempt to rationalise and codify this. It give no special insight into these matters compare to other religions of it’s time and most invented since. Believers who study the contents of their religious texts talk about them in the same way the a book reviewer does if they have read the book three or four times. Ask a lord of the rings fan to tell you about the book you’ll get the picture. Johns Imagine song was a song about if you took away the things we always seems to fight about then maybe we would live in peace. Your arguing that if Everone believed the same as you we would all live in peace what’s the difference?

Peter you say: "The only basis that is left once the person has been freed to be himself is desire. Natural desire is to be our guiding light in all things. This means that greed, sensuousness, power, vindictiveness and envy are free to have their way with us. In the words of Paul we are to be delivered over to the elemental spirits of the universe so that we live under the law of sin and death."

This is one of many non-sequiturs in your piece. An infidel wouldn't see what is wrong with certain desires. Your list of desires are all fairly negative behaviours. An infidel can desire to live a harmless life with desires that are positive. One can choose the positive rules of many cultures as a guide. Many cultures share particular laws - that is, they are universal. This is not to mention the universality of human feeling. Paul says: such and such - so what? It is just his opiniion.

I was bought up an Anglican and I have had very positive experiences with that particiular religion; but it would be wrong of me to pretend that I agree with all its precepts and preachings. Among other things, given the you-are-either-with-us-or-against-us attitude of the church and that the negative desires mentioned in P.S.s article are found in the noisiest religious folk, I have chosen to be non-religious and thus authentic. This is not a sin -but honesty. (To be frank I don't care if it is a sin).

I found this Shelley saying (which alludes to some desirious positive things) for you and interested bloggers.

Until the mind can love and admire,
And trust and hope, and endure,
Reasoned principles of moral conduct
Are seeds cast upon the highway
Of life which the unconscious
Passenger tramples into dust,
Although they would bear the
Harvest of happiness.

Csteele, like most of the responses to date, has completely missed the point.

He/she relates a Gospel story that is profound as are all the stories of encounter of Jesus with women. And concludes that "Christ made the first tentative steps toward universality". I would have thought his whole life was one of moving away from the universality of the Law to the particularity of oneness with the Father.

It is my understanding that Peter Sellick is talking of particularity and universality in terms of the personal v the masses; the personal encounter v the religious process; the beauty of the "I am" v the barrenness of the "God is this or that"; the historical story v abstracted ideals.

In the Christian context, it is indeed the particularity of the personal relationship with God through the incarnate Jesus and Risen Lord that has for too long been obstructed through the universalistic formularised bible-book religion and doctrinal-ritualised religion of the Protestant and Catholic traditions over the last centuries. Yet the Christian West, through its millennia of formation, and the experience of the bloodiest century just behind us, still has residual faith and human institutional roots that grew within Christianity's moral ecosystem, to safe guard us for the time being of the nationalistic and tribal excesses of the Rwanda and Balkans tragedies. Yet I fear the steps from the village to the jungle are lessening.

In my view, in the secular context, the shallow universality in the "imagineering " of John Lennon is displayed as perhaps the worst expression of imagination; no roots, no direction and ultimately no hope. He was a great Beatle, but deluded almost everywhere else. Of course that is okay, it is just that he should not have peddled it to the emerging 'free thinkers", who problematically "felt" rather than "thought". What a fine mess they have gotten us into, in the words of another talented, but benign entertainer.