Religion: it’s at the centre of world affairs, but profound questions still remain. Why are you here? What happens when you die? Does God matter? God Forbid seeks the answers.
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Mother Earth. Mother Mary. The "good mother." Is there a more impossible standard than motherhood itself? Every culture seems to believe in a mother who is endless. Endlessly patient, endlessly giving, endlessly present. In Christianity she's Mary, the sinless virgin, the giving and eternal mother of the church. In psychology she's the "Good Mother", always available and calm, never faltering. In…
Your phone will tell you the time, and that number has an extraordinary history. And hasn't always been there. Time used to be whatever the church bell said it was. Time was rung, sung and prayed. It belonged to God. Then we put time in a box on the wall. Then on our wrist. Now in our pocket and on our satellites. Yet – there’s no expert consensus on whether time even flows from past present to…
Every civilisation that's ever existed has asked the same question: what's actually real? Plato made the point that it's more than we can see with our own eyes. Then came Newton, and reality became a clock with time. Then came Einstein, and time started to bend. Then came quantum mechanics — and reality gets stranger still! Two astrophysicists go back to the beginning of humanity to ask "what did…
If you hit your finger with a hammer, would you feel it the same way a medieval carpenter did, doing exactly the same thing? Well, apparently not. We think of our feelings as the most private and immediate things we own. Hit your thumb, and YOU know pain when YOU feel it. But historians of emotion say that's a modern conceit. Pain, grief, love, loneliness — none of them are fixed. They're made, by…
Is racism about the colour of your skin, the history of colonialism, or the size of your bank account?
The White House has a cage fight on the Whitehouse front lawn while, somewhere, a father rose at 3am to feed a crying baby. In 2026, what does it mean to be a good father, or a good man? Does God, or any religious tradition, see men as something distinct? Or is “be a good man” just “be a good person”? The manosphere claims religious sanction. Is that a corruption of these traditions, or an…
Do to a dog what we do to a factory-farmed pig, and you’d be arrested. Do it to ten thousand pigs in a shed, and it’s breakfast. Most of us say cruelty to animals is wrong. And then most of us are happy to have them killed and eat them. Both our panellists think the way we treat animals is a moral catastrophe. But they get there by opposite roads. One says animals matter because they suffer. The…
We are, it turns out, a species that refuses to believe its own birth certificate. Australia is ageing, fast. This is not new here, or in Europe and North America where the trend has existed for decades. But even in China and now India, the fertility rate has dropped below replacement levels – even the two most populous nations on earth are getting older. Yet we’ve built a world — our economies,…
You heard that someone had come unstuck. A rival. A bully. Someone overconfident, or two-faced, or just a bit too pleased with themselves. And something in you was glad. You won't say it out loud. You might barely admit it to yourself. But the Germans have a word for it. And it turns out, so did the ancient Greeks. Schadenfreude. The pleasure we take in others' misfortune. Is it a moral failing? A…
Whether or not you believe in - or even know about "the Rapture", "the Tribulation", "the End Times", and "Armageddon", your life is influenced by the idea that Jesus Christ will not only return, he’ll go to Jerusalem, and from there, for exactly one thousand years, he’ll rule the world. Yet, this concept is not in the Bible...at least not directly. But a bible, published in America in 1909, and…
