Dr Paul Bain teaches in the Psychology Department at Murdoch University.
Here is his preliminary report on a survey done a few months ago in which several Atheists including myself took part.
Thank you to Dr Bain for allowing us to publish this report which provides useful information about current attitudes of some religious people and some Atheists.

Religion and Australian Society – Feedback report (Interviews)

Dr Paul Bain

Background

This project examined people’s views of the role and effects of religion and atheism on Australian society in the future.

We all develop our ideas by contact and discussion with others who are interested in the same issues.

My views continue to develop and in recent years I have come to believe that there are religious people who are not really a negative force and that church organizations can be very useful social instruments.

Sometimes people come to the website and want to register but are put off by the need to satisfy a captcha. It sometimes also crops up when a registered user posts a comment.

Many are not clear about why such a thing is used.
The purpose is to make it more difficult for spam merchants to infect the website with a 'bot' which is a piece of virus software which will enable spam to enter the website.

By typing in the words and numbers offered in the image you demonstrate that you are human and not an automated piece of software.

It is a nuisance but it saves us from a worse problem.

She is a dedicated Catholic and a contributor to columns for a couple of newspapers and hers is yet another reaction against those who would separate politics from religion.
What I particularly want to focus on however is her repetition of the common claim that Western Civilization owes its greatest debt to Christianity.
Here is part of that claim:

"It always amuses me how little the opponents of religion understand the complex philosophical foundations of Western democracy and the debt they owe to religious philosophy in our understanding of the human being.

Israel's politics may have been captured by its own extremists just as that of Gaza has been captured by theirs.
If this is the case then there is little hope for peace in the Middle East and a civilized life for ordinary people there.

Religion has defined which tribal group you belong to in a way that is unimaginable to us in Australia.

There are non religious Jews here and in Israel who deplore Israel's behavior in Gaza and want accountability but they are drowned out by the religious right wing.

I didn't pick up the original article in The Australian but here are the letter comments from readers on the following day.
It looks as though the article was one of those predictable cases of the religious ignoring the argument to attack the person.
If Atheists dare to show their faces and disagree with a religious monopoly then brand them with a name you consider unfavorable.
However most of the replies show that there are a lot of people who reject this tactic.
Check it out.

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/c...

If the faithful don't have enough sense to walk away from this one then their cause is truly hopeless.

Ireland was once the source of most Australian priests and nuns.
It was a priest ridden society.
Things have certainly changed. The great arbiters of morals and ethics have been called to account for their own gross immorality by the secular institutions of the law of the land.

Now the Church wants the faithful to pay the financial costs of their misdeeds.

We had a stall at the Hyde Park Holiday festival on Sunday 28 February and Monday 1 March.
The weather was blistering hot 39C and 40C and the lake was in a miserable condition because of the record period without rain, but nevertheless there was still quite a good crowd and we had the opportunity to talk to quite a lot of people.
We had a lot of positive reaction and found many people were either definite Atheists or at the very least, unaffected by religion.

You may already have seen this story shown on Four Corners last night.
It is not only shocking; it is puzzling.
Isn't Afghanistan a Muslim nation?
Doesn't Islam prohibit homosexual sex and kill those who engage in it?
Are these guys still Muslims? Do they go to the Mosque?
Is it possible that there is a degree of hypocrisy here?????

Another question. What does Kazai's government really stand for.
We know that it has allowed favored warlords and government officials to become disgustingly rich in a terribly poor country.