Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

"It is a chaotic nation in which everything seems to be happening at once. The immense building projects underway, the masses of factories and power stations pumping out unbelievable smog, the huge coal fields and endless villages - you can't help but wonder, constantly, where China is going with all this." Phil Uebergang

"Australian society takes its benign secularism for granted, but it didn't occur by accident. It's an end result of centuries of political and social struggle and while Australians blithely go about their daily business in this safe and unified nation, few thoughts are spared for the sequence of events that have brought us to this fortunate situation." Phil Uebergang

"A group of conveniently accommodating imaginary 'experts' are invoked by Duffy, who claim that we are fighting a war against terrorism - a spurious claim in itself - largely for the sake of 'evolutionary theory'. Having mentioned the war for dramatic effect it is immediately discarded, to be replaced by a quote from a noted historian who supposedly legitimises the imaginary experts by claiming that Darwin's theory of evolution is the 'most important idea of all time'. Apparently it is more important, to Duffy at least, than the idea of brotherly love and tolerance." Phil Uebergang

"Recently Australia's Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, gave his qualified support for Intelligent Design (ID) to be taught in school science classes alongside neo-Darwinian evolutionary origins theory. The debate that has been occurring in the U.S. looks set to come to Australia. The fundamental question seems to be - is Christian doctrine forcing its way into the science classroom at the expense of scientific teaching? But is this the appropriate question? Ignoring those who contribute nothing more than mindless disparagement of religion, there are interesting ethical issues underlying this controversy." Phil Uebergang

G'day. I'm in Parliament House writing this as a Senate Committee formed when the Senate had the power of numbers to investigate government misdeeds interrogates officials over Chen and Alvarez. Tomorrow the new Senate sits and the dance begins with new steps. Today Webdiary's faith and values columnist, Phil Uebergang, writes of our dreams while asleep.

On both sides of the Creation/Evolution debate there was character assassination, wilful misunderstanding, deliberate misrepresentation, unqualified intellectual arrogance, childish insulting, and all without much effort to really listen to the other side. So how does a person go about having a belief, and defending it, without falling into the moral quagmire of intolerance of another’s belief?" Origin of the species debate organiser Phil Uebergang

‘Did the universe and life evolve, or was it specially created in six days?’ Here are the third and final arguments in the debate on origins.