Dr Paul Allen

Air travel is not what it used to be. In the 1980s and 1990s, you could accompany your relatives or friends to the terminal, sit and talk with them at the gate while waiting for boarding, give your kisses and hugs, and leisurely head back for home.  Teenagers and some “20-somethings” will have no such memories. Now it’s the baleful experience of security lines, searches, removing stuff for the metal detectors, and full body pat-downs. Some of us may also have anxieties about pilots who want to become suicidal “martyrs” by crashing the plane, like the nineteen Islamists who hijacked planes on 9/11, or the pilot of Egypt Air Flight 804 in May 2016, or, perhaps, the pilot of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014 – not to mention potential “shoe-bombers” or “underwear-bombers” who might be missed by such searches. And thanks to Islamic zeal, such security is now a routine experience, every day, at over 41,000 airports around the world – unlikely to change in the for...

AUSTRALIAN researchers believe they may be on the brink of rewriting the history of the universe. A paper being published in a US physics journal suggests it may be possible to view "cracks" in the universe that would support the theory of "quantum graphity", considered to be the holy grail of physics. The team of researchers from the University of Melbourne and RMIT say that instead of thinking of the start of the universe as being a big bang, we should imagine it as a cooling of water into ice."Think of the early universe as being like a liquid," Melbourne University theoretical physics researcher James Quach said."Then as the universe cools, it ` crystalises '."The reason we use the water analogy is water is without form."In the beginning there wasn't even space, space did not exist because there was no form." Their research rests on a school of thought that has emerged recently to suggest space is made of indivisibl...

Christian views on Hell (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) One of the great questions that faces the church today concerns the existence and the nature of hell . Hell is under attack from outside the visible church and from inside. The question each one of us must answer is this: Does hell exist? Is it, as Christians have long claimed, a place of eternal, conscious punishment, a real place where real people will go for real time and face the real wrath of a real God? To ask whether hell exists is not really a question about a place, like when you ask, “Does the city of Melbourne actually exist?” or “Was there really a city called Jericho ?” It is not a question of world geography, but of Divine character. The question of hell is first and foremost a question about the character of God. If there is a hell, we know that it cannot exist outside of the knowledge and the will of God. If God is who he says he is, if he really is all-knowing and all-powerful, then people cannot be there out...

According to the most recent figures released in the annual report of the Australian Consultative Council on Obstetric and Paediatric Mortality and Morbidity , 345 late-term abortions were committed in Victoria State in 2007. Of these, the report states that 164 were performed at a Melbourne clinic on women with perfectly healthy unborn children who said they were suffering psychological or “social” problems. Though most of the abortions were carried out on women about six months pregnant, two of the aborted children were older than 28 weeks. A further 181 late-term abortions were committed on babies diagnosed with genetic abnormalities. Fifty-four of these babies survived the procedure to die post-natally, according to the figures released in the state government report. In Victoria, late-term abortions can be carried out for "psycho-social" reasons even if there is no declaration of a threat to the mother's health. The report says that many of the women given lat...