February 2018 In line with the recommendations of groups such as the Queensland Branch of the Australian Medical Association (AMAQ), Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG), the Queensland Nurses Union, the Health...
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights regarding the operation of Part IIA of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) including sections 18C and 18D Summary of the Atheist Foundation of Australia’s position: 1. Whether the operation of Part IIA of the Racial...
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull plans to introduce proposed legislation to enable a marriage equality plebiscite in Parliament. A survey of LGBTIQ people found that they, the people most affected by this decision, are opposed to a plebiscite. Almost 200 LGBTIQ...
The recent episode of ABC's Q&A called "Church And State" had plenty of food for thought, with an estimated religious studio audience of around 70%, and included an audience member's question which compared the 'marginalisation of...
Scott Morrison will hand down the budget on 3rd May with one glaring omission – the nation's irreligious. A national poll in March showed 64 per cent (1) of Australians oppose religion being tax-exempt. Yet hundreds of diverse church denominations avoid an...
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
Ilka Chase
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Bertrand Russell
It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
“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
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard Shaw
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Christopher Marlowe
Scientific research confirms that humans are a link in the evolutionary life chain. There is no credible evidence for the existence of an immortal supernatural element. Our only life is here and now. Make it worthy of a moral person.
Keith S. Cornish
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
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
Cardinal Robert Bellarmine
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
