On the 10th of August, a census is being conducted to collect important data on the circumstances and attitudes of the Australian people. Your friends and family will be asked if they hold religious beliefs, and it’s an important chance for them to think carefully...
The Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) is disappointed to advise that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Heretic and Infidel, has withdrawn from the 2018 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne. However, MCs for the event – the largest gathering of its kind in the southern...
The Atheist Foundation of Australia is excited to announce that it will be presenting Cosmic Shambles LIVE in Australia in March/April 2017. Cosmic Shambles LIVE is a variety show that celebrates curiosity and reason, an explosion of science, comedy, music and...
As the next Australian Census approaches (9 August 2016), the Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) is preparing for one of its biggest and most important projects. The AFA is campaigning to encourage individuals and families to think about the importance and impact...
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...
As part of our annual AFA Committee Conference and Strategy Day, elections are held for Committee officeholders. We would like to inform members of significant changes to these. The AFA Committee of Management congratulates Kylie Sturgess on being elected unopposed as...
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
Simone de Beauvoir
Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Richard Dawkins
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
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
H. L. Mencken
Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.
Salman Rushdie
Truth in matters of religion is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar Wilde
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”