AFA Vice-president Michael Boyd spoke with the Reverend Bill Crews on 2GB about churches paying taxes, as raised in our recent Religious Charity! What Is It Good For? Media Release.
The audio can be found at this link.
By 4774303971
Recent Posts
- Religious Freedom Bill Submission
- Submission to the Australian Bureau of Statistics – Review of 2021 Census Topics
- Submission to the Queensland Law Reform Commission Review of Termination of Pregnancy Laws
- Non-believers now Australia's largest religious group: Time to listen to what we want
- Religious Freedom Review Panel Submission
My neurologist once told me that people with temporal lobe epilepsy are very often intensely religious. Certainly just before I have a grand mal fit I have a 'vision' of such peace, joy and significance that I can only call it God. What does this say about the whole nature of religious vision? Certain episodes in the lives of the saints have acquired a new meaning for me. When Theresa of Avila had her three-day vision of hell, was she simply having a temporal lobe attack? The horrors she saw are similar to those I have experienced, but in her case informed by the religious imagery of her time. Like other saints who have 'seen' hell she describes an appalling stench, which is part of an epileptic aura. Is it possible that the feeling I have had all my life that something - God, perhaps? - is just over the horizon, something unimaginable but almost tangibly present, is simply the result of an electrical irregularity in my brain? It is a question that can't yet be answered, unless it be that God, if He exists, could have created us with that capacity for Him, glimpsed at only when the brain is convulsed. What I can say, however, is that if my 'visions' have sometimes let me into 'Hell' they have also given me possible intimations of a Heaven which I would not have been without.
Karen Armstrong
It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
Gloria Steinem
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
Isaac Asimov
If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.
Frank Zappa
The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.
Stephen Hawking
I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
Clarence Darrow
“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
Douglas Adams
Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
Robert G. Ingersoll
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
Simone de Beauvoir
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.