Cee Lo Green - Stupid or Just Religious?

 

First of all I know that the title is a false dilemma, so if your here just to point that out, congratulations for being so clever. This is my first post in a while, but I've been busy moving, getting ready for my masters program and hibernating (It's cold in Canada).

Anyway, I was getting ready to break out of the new years slump when I heard about Cee Lo Green's New Years Eve performance where he changed the words to John Lennon's song Imagine.  Now I'm not a huge Beatles fan, but I don't mind them by any means and I respect what a song is trying to say when it does have a clear message, which is more than I can say for Cee Lo.

I'm also an atheist, so the words that were changed drew a lot of interest. Instead of saying, "Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too." Cee Lo chose to sing, "Nothing to kill or die for and all religion's true."

I understand the personal reasons that could have lead Cee Lo Green to change the words of the song to represent himself better, and he should have the freedom to do so, but I also have the freedom to criticize the changes he made.

The problem isn't that Cee Lo made changes to the song, it's that the changes he made ruined the message/meaning of the song. John Lennon wasn't bashing religion when he sang of there being an absence of religion. He was creating a situation where all the things that define and keep people separate from each other were magically taken away, so that people could be free to get along.  That being the case I don't see why even a religious person would have a problem with the hypothetical situation, just as no religious person should have a problem with John Rawl's Vail of Ignorance. 

It's a hypothetical situation created to show something, and if you don't like what you see because, you see that the world would be better off without religion than you don't have a problem with the hypothetical, you have a problem with religion. However, if you see the world as worse off without religion in the scenario 'Imagine' creates then there is no need to be offended by it, or to change the words.

That said, lets look at what Cee Lo Green created when he changed the words. Instead of there being no religion in the hypothetical situation, all religions are true. Well, that's nice to say, but how would it really work?

1. There could be one world where the rules change all the time, and then what ever your religion says comes true. It would  be an arbitrary world where everyone's religion's were true, but where it would be impossible to really communicate with others because of basic incompatibilities. For instance, 2+2 would be 4 for some people and maybe other people would have a religion where 2+2 = 5 and in Cee Lo's world both of them would  be correct. Yet, this complete incompatibility would leave people unable to communicate basic truths to each other and even if they could communicate them, they would be meaningless to the other person who has their own truth. 

2. Another way for it to work would be for every person to have their own little world where what their personal religion says is true. This is a world where you can be happy about having the capital 't' truth that just doesn't exist now, but it is also a world disconnected from everyone else. 

Either way, these are situations that seem less desirable than the world in which we currently reside, but that's alright because Cee Lo tweeted a clarification for us, "Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that’s all.”

I have a news flash for Cee Lo, we live in a world where you can believe whatever you want! You don't have to create a hypothetical situation so see what that world looks like. There is no thought police, and the only limitations are in John Lennon's terms, what you can 'Imagine'.

So while he meant no disrespect, he did manage to take a classic song, ruin the message it had and create a new message that doesn't make any sense. If this were a game of clue we would find Mr. Green in the study humming while he urinated on John Lennon's rug that just so happened to tie the room together.

I've clearly put more thought into this than Cee Lo did, because I think anyone who knows the message of the song and then went through the implications of Cee Lo's words would come to the same conclusions I have.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

P.S. To those who were waiting to find out what a false dilemma was, it's when you're given a choice between a limited number of things and the answer isn't necessarily contained within the list of choices. Cee Lo Green is both stupid and religious, a choice excluded in the title. 

The Rawlsian Agreement for Health Care

I guess I haven't been drinking often enough to keep posting, but I thought I'd get back to it and try to give a few weekly words of attempted wisdom. One thing I have been doing lately is listening to a lot of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe , and I have become completely enamored with and recommend to everyone....or at least the few people who will read this. I mean where else can you find out about stories of somewhat reputable scientists saying that the universe is stopping the large hadron collider by it being sabotaged through time travel.

Now that I have plugged my favorite podcast, I guess I'll start my blog by creating the idea of the Rawlsian agreement. John Rawls came up with an idea that he thinks would be universally usable to create justice. I'm going to skip the rest of the importance parts of his theory of justice and concentrate on the two principles of justice as fairness, but if your interested you can find them here under the heading of number 4.These principles govern inequalities in a system and say that 1. For any inequality there has to be a fair an equal chance to obtain that inequality for everyone, what is call the fair equality of opportunity. 2. That any inequality be to the advantage of the 'least' members of society, the difference principle. Justice as fairness seems unfeasible at a social level, but I think it would work well for a setting up a system of health care.

      It may seem that this would only work with a public system but it doesn't mean I'm totally against a private option in some cases, all cases in fact, with the exception of cases where people would refuse to let someone ahead of them even if would be for the betterment of society, kind of a Rawlsian agreement for making things unequal. For example most people with a minor injury would let someone go ahead of them in the hospital line for 100 dollars or so, but no one would move back in the waiting list for a new heart or kidney for that amount of money. It might be argued that, that person may move back for 1 000 000 dollars, even if it did put them at a much greater risk of death or serious debilitation. That may be true the money may be too good to turn down, but I find that the 1 000 000 dollar situation would be unethical in a way that society in Canada at least agrees with. No one can pay 1 000 000 dollars to kill someone else, but they could pay 100 dollars to move ahead of them in line. I hope that example makes the idea consistent with societies ethics and understandable.

A whole medical system could be set up like this, made up with Rawlsian agreements with limits. This system would be two tiered, but set up for all the inequalities to be to the advantage to those in the second tier. I understand this would take a lot of work to set up, but it would end up being universal health care that was helped by the rich subsidizing the care for the poor, a real trickle down effect.

I'm interested in what people think of the Rawlsian agreement and what problems this system would have, hope to get some response with this and I'll try to continue to blog more often.

Thanks for reading,

The Moral Skeptic