Sigh. Where to begin.
I just wasted 34 minutes on a very perplexing video. The madness began with a Facebook post where two of my “friends” proclaimed the vid would “open my eyes, change my life, and rock my soul.” I saw Comfort’s name and, well, morbid curiosity overcame common sense.
Near as I can tell, Genius is an interesting attempt to rewrite history, make John Lennon a christian (not a real one, but a kinda/sorta-christian for a while), an anti-evolutionist, and a (likely) current hell-dweller.
Ironically, this video (which available for free!) coincides with the soon to be release of Comfort’s book, “The Beatles, God and the Bible.”
The vid follows Comfort’s pattern of shocking people over how sinful they are. He engages in “street evangelism,” peppering people with leading questions, allowing them to admit they’re liars and cheats. As usual, he also finds a very dramatic person who doesn’t believe in gods.
I was struck by how, towards the end of the video, Comfort himself sounded pretty dramatic as he yelled at his interviewees; a very interesting juxtaposition, indeed. But I digress. Let’s talk about the vid, eh? I’ll hot link the source of each quote at the beginning since I dug into a few sources for this post.
The video was created as part of Comfort’s work on his new “The Beatles, God and the Bible” book project, and along the way, lays out a likely meaning behind the mystic words in Lennon’s “Imagine,” which these days is played each New Year’s Eve before the crystal ball drops in New York’s Times Square.
The “Genius” project is in the style of “180,” the video project that showed people reversing their position on abortion, from positive support to total opposition, in just a matter of minutes when Comfort confronts them with the truth about the procedure.
This article claims that Comfort knows what Lennon really meant in his song, “Imagine.”
Comfort explains that even though many believe Lennon’s “Imagine” lyrics reveal a total disbelief in faith and God, that may not be the case.
Those lyrics being: “Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people, Living for today… Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too…”
That came from the same mind of Lennon who once said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
But Comfort notes that Lennon’s own explanation of the lyrics were that, “It is the concept of positive prayer. If you could imagine a world peace with no denominations or religion … not without religion but without this my-god-is-bigger-than-your-god thing…”
I’m pleased that Comfort knows more about Lennon’s work than… say… the people who knew him.
The Christian Post calls the video “chilling.”
Referring to the hypothetical questions he asks people on the streets of Huntington Beach, Calif., and other cities, Comfort adds, “It’s chilling because it reveals what people will do for money. There are ordinary people out there who would kill you. All they need is the right money and the belief that they won’t get caught.”
I see a bit of a problem here. Saying “I’d kill someone for 10 million” (with a snicker on your face) is quite different than actually killing someone. I see a disconnect. Plus, what that line of questioning has to do with Lennon, I never figured out. It appears to be a vehicle to… well:
While gaining much attention for the movie with discussion about Lennon, the film primarily features discussion about sin and God. Comfort’s evangelistic style includes helping people realize that they are sinners “like everybody else” and they need the grace of God.
Yeah. That.
Comfort claims to “reveal the Real John Lennon” at last.
Ken Mansfield, who was a member of the Beatles inner sanctum for years and was on top of the Apple building in London as the Fab Four played for the last time, said, “‘Genius’ will open your eyes.”
He says he knew the real John Lennon, and “That’s who we have portrayed in ‘Genius’ – the real John Lennon.”
Comfort said, “It has twists and turns that you don’t expect. ‘Genius’ shows another unheard of side of John Lennon and that will certainly ‘open your eyes,’ as Ken Mansfield so aptly said.”
But that’s what I don’t get. I watched it. My eyes don’t feel open. In fact, I can’t help but wonder how Comfort knows Lennon better than his friends, family, wife, children… how can he do this to the Lennon estate, especially when at least some of the information appears to be incorrect and/or incomplete. In fact, the vid feels quite lean on the Lennon information (thankfully) and heavy on the proselytizing.
The Sensuous Curmudgeon points this out about Lennon’s supposed refutation of evolution:
In the vid, Lennon says:
Lennon also said at one point, “I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to man. It’s absolutely irrational garbage. They set up these idols and then they knock them down. It keeps all the old professors happy at the university. It gives them something to do. Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same experts who made them up in the first place.”
Sensuous Curmudgon then says:
Whoa! This is really important stuff! If John Lennon actually said that, then … this changes everything! So we started frantically Googling until we found the entry for John Lennon at Wikiquote, where we found this, and we’ll use red font [I used bold] to highlight a few items Comfort doesn’t talk about:
Here’s Lennon’s full quote courtesy of SC:
Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way…That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t’ve come from anything — fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage. It’s absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists.
That and the monkey thing are both as insane as the other. I’ve nothing to base it on; it’s only a gut feeling. They always draw that progression-these apes standing up suddenly. The early men are always drawn like apes, right? Because that fits in the theory we have been living with since Darwin.
Here’s where you can find the correct quote.
Curmudgeon concludes with this:
You can understand that we’re shocked — shocked! — to learn that Comfort somehow neglected to tell us that Lennon not only rejected Darwin’s theory, he also thought the young earth creationists were insane.
I too, am amazed that Comfort not only distorted Lennon’s life, quote mined, assumed to know more about him than those in his inner circle, but he’s taking strange snippets of the Lennon story to advance his current version of the “salvation” message.
Very disappointing that people swallow this “documentary” without question.
If you have the gumption, be one of the almost 100k people to enjoy Ray Comfort’s Genius.
