God Forbid

Generation Z is the first generation since the war to start out with less claim on the country than their parents. You might believe this story is just all about economics. Negative gearing, property investment, supply...

Neuroscience is now spectacularly good at explaining how brains work. But there’s one thing it still can’t explain: why having a brain feels like something. Like anything at all! Philosophers call this the Hard Problem...

The Northern Territory is set to become the final Australian jurisdiction to legalise voluntary assisted dying (VAD). While thirty years of arguing comes to an end, God Forbid examines the wider conversations that are...

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...

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...

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...

If you hit your finger with a hammer, would you feel it the same way a medieval carpenter did, doing exactly the same thing?

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Most of us spend most of our waking hours working, paid and unpaid. From housework to paid work, most of our lives are dominated by work. It's so ingrained that losing our true selves in work can feel unavoidable. Yet...

Halloween, in the western Christian tradition, remembers the dead – saints, martyrs, and all the faithful departed. But why do so many believe the departed return? Regardless of the place on earth, or time in history...