...a fundamental one, and it's one that the Catholic church really can't resile from. The trouble with the Pope is that the whole concept is so ludicrous, that it's only the simplest and least educated people, concerned almost solely with survival and with no scientific knowledge to draw upon, who could let it through their plausibility radar. I doubt there is a single Cardinal in the Catholic church who genuinely, in their heart of hearts, really truly believes that God is personally choosing the Pope through them, but that's what Catholics are supposed to believe. If God is really personally...

Alchemy gets a bad rap these days, seen only as a primitive version of chemistry - its practitioners greedy fools thinking they could turn lead into gold. The truth is that Alchemy was an early attempt to understand how the world worked, and it blended ideas from religion and science. Some Alchemists believed that if they understood enough about the elemental forces in nature, they would be able to create the philosopher's stone, which would be able to turn base matter into gold. Other Alchemists were driven more by the quest for spiritual enlightenment, and saw their proto-chemistry experiments...

Religious people often claim that atheists can't possibly have a moral compass that will guide us to behave well, since we have no God to tell us what is right and what's wrong. I find it ironic, therefore, to read in today's Age an article about a Rabbi at a Jewish college here in Melbourne who "has changed his evidence about his knowledge of alleged paedophilia and conceded he was aware in the early 2000s of rumours that a former security guard had molested children". Suffice it to say that the subject of the rumours was not immediately reported to the police. What would you do if there were...