You’d think that it’d be pretty easy to understand a message behind one of the world’s most well known pop songs and that by changing the lyrics it would completely undermine said message. But Cee Lo Green can’t figure that out. That guy took Imagine by John Lennon and decided to change one lyric in his New Year’s Eve performance just so that people wouldn’t think he was an atheist.

The original line is “imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too.”

Mr. Green’s cover version replaces the last part of that with “and all religion is true.”

Come on now. John Lennon is rolling in his grave. Imagine is a song that asks the listener to get rid of all of the divisive aspects of humanity. People fight wars over borders and religions and Lennon’s idea to imagine a world without those things is to imagine a world at peace. Green says the opposite. He recommends that all religions be true, therefore undermining the entire point of the song.

This is a man who obviously understands the importance of lyrics, so how could he make such a huge misstep on this one? He might as well have stopped singing in the middle of the song and said “I want to have 9/11 all over again, please.” A religious war seems to be exactly what Mr. Green would like in our lives by changing the lyrics in this way. Sure, he is foolishly trying to not espouse the atheist tendencies of the song by letting people know he likes his religion, but in doing so, he is by default arguing that his religion is right, therefore all other religions are inferior, therefore the believers of those religions will hate him and therefore they are free to commit genocide based on religious differences. Oh, and it also implies that he is OK with killing other people in the name of religion.

Green should have known better. If he didn’t want to sound like an atheist, he should have picked a different song. Nothing stopped him from singing What a Wonderful World instead. He could have sang a non-politically/non-religious themed song. Instead, he chose to sing the one song that has had extreme mainstream success over the decades specifically because it argues against arbitrary divisions of humanity. And for his complete lack of understanding of the original message of the song, this man deserves to be punished.

It is now the official stance of Tears of Time to boycott Cee Lo Green in every thing that he does.

I know it’s been said a billion times since the airing of this concert on New Year’s Eve due to the fact that it’s an easy way to phrase the outrage that people have over this incident, but I have nothing more to say than “Cee Lo Green — fuck you.”