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Nicholas Vo
John Kubler
English 115
3 September 2013
Letter to John Lennon
Greetings Mr. Lennon, I was listening to your song, Imagine the other day and although
it has an uplifting tune, I disagree with what you are saying. In your song, you ask us to imagine a
world without countries, religion, and possessions. I agree that those aspects are divisive, but
removing them from the world also eliminates their beneficial properties. In Madeleine Albrights
essay, Faith and Diplomacy, she explains that wars waged on the principle of religion are fought
more ferociously than conflicts based on other ideas, but Religion also has unifying properties too.
Now lets imagine a world without religion. Albright uses the examples of Lenins Soviet Union,
Mao Zedongs Communist China, and Hitlers Nazi Germany. I believe your song is a plea for a
Communist world. I agree that a world without countries, religion, and possessions, would bring
worldwide peace, but what will it do to our humanity? Without countries, everyone would be
wanderers, searching for a place they would like to call home. Without religion, or the belief in
a heaven or hell, people would live their lives as if there were no consequences and they would all
end up in the same place anyway. Religion is also beneficial in the way that it allows people to
hope. In Albrights essay, she tells a story of a woman, named Mary, who was shot and left to die
during a civil war in Lebanon. Mary survived, but was left paralyzed. The people who saved her
were those who had left her to die. Some may ask the question Why did they save her? Marys
response is You know, sometimes bad people are taught to do good things(Albright 37).
Religion allows people to believe in a better world and believe in the others around them. Religion
helps them believe that where there is darkness, there is light and where there is evil, there is also

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good. A world without possessions would not be world at all. People would not have anything to
live for and nothing to call their own.
To sum it up, what your song is asking is for a Communist world in which people would
live as if they were robots. A world without religion, countries, and possessions would remove all
things that make us human. It would eliminate our belief system, our diversity, and our desires.
That is not a beautiful world.