>Who was/is the best leader of all time?
>i.e. which leader would you must like to be governed by today and why?
thebigqs
>What is the dominant life form on Earth? How do we decide this? Is this life form better than others?
>Should we aim to achieve happiness?
>We often talk about happiness, and all people agree that it’s a nice thing to have. But should we try to achieve it as individuals and/or as collectives e.g. states?
>Inheritance
>Should it be taxed or not? If so by how much? Do you think that all people have the right to pass their surplus cash onto friends and family or do you believe in complete equality of opportunity i.e. that everyone should start from a roughly level playing field and therefore achieve based solely on ability?
>Does universal morality exist?
>*Everyone (with the exception of a few weirdos) believes that murdering for the sake of murdering is wrong.
*Every culture has a limit on the number of women one can marry (yes, some say you can have 10 wives while others say only one, but there is still a limit), therefore suggesting that it is wrong to simply sleep with or marry any woman one pleases.
*If we make a promise to someone and break it, we try to justify it. However, if one breaks a promise to us we feel wronged, therefore implying that breaking a promise/treaty is unjustifiable.
*If there was a person drowning in a nearby creek and we had the ability to save them without any threat to our own lives, everyone would probably do it (again, with the exception of some weirdos)
These are the arguments of a theorist known as C.S. Lewis. He argues that universal morality exists even among different cultures. Now I ask whether or not his arguments are strong?
Is there universal morality?
>Broken Britain?
>We’ve all heard the claim that Britain has a ‘broken’ culture, even if we don’t live there. The issue has become one of the Conservatives strongest campaigning points. But is it true?
>"That’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that"
>This is a quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent spoke of a feeling that there was something going on in the universe that nobody would tell him about. “Oh no” says Zaphod Beeblebrox, “That’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that”.
This feeling is what films like The Truman Show and The Matrix play on. But does anyone know what that feeling is? Is it really universal? If so what causes it and what is it’s function?
>Great Modern Books
>The great books are held to be great cultural achievements and long term assets. Many films have entered this category too over the past few decades. But what books remain either undiscovered or worthy of being made into film that have not yet been already?
In other words what stories would you like to see made into film?
>Proportional Representation or not?
>The UK is divided into 646 electoral regions known as constituencies. From each constituency one person is elected by a ‘First Past the Vote’ system where the person with the most votes wins.
But when that person becomes a Member of Parliament should he/she be representing the constituency or the UK? After all the UK has not voted for them, only that constituency.
So should we have Proportional Representation whereby if 25% of the people voted for party A party A got 25% of the seats in Parliament? What do you think?
>Is progression linear?
>A few sub-questions to think about…
- What is progression?
- Are there stages of history that societies pass through?
- Do we inevitably improve ourselves individually and collectively?
- Was everything chaos in the beginning and will it be in the end?
- Was everything ‘eden’ (the Hebrew word for pleasure/paradise) in the beginning and will return to it in the end?
Battison's Blog 