Ms Rebecca Goodman from the AA of A explained to stunned journalists outside the organisation's headquarters in Melbourne:
"It's no good", she said, "people just want to believe. We've spent years giving them all the facts, doubting every pronouncement made by some bearded loon in a robe, trotting cool scientists like Dr Karl and Brian Cox out to explain things to people and it hasn't made a damn of difference."
"Like the good scientists we are, we have to accept the evidence in front of us; people are addicted to belief. And in the most unlikely things. There's little point in us continuing any more."
There is speculation that the straw that broke the camel's back was the latest opinion polls showing a shift in public sentiment to the opposition. Sources close to the board of the As report conversations between the members along the lines of,
"It's the same shite the politicians offered last year, and three years ago and before that. And for every election since the dawn of democracy. Lower taxes, more services (do the maths), a hard line on crime and a guarantee that the country will be full of people 'just like you'". Local members who pretend that they'll have the ability to do something about the state of the roads when they don't even know how to hold a shovel the right way round. It's unbelievable that it's believable to even the meanest intelligence."
And it would seem that the board's despair is well grounded in fact. Opinion polls do indeed strongly suggest that the public think that the opposition leader - despite having no power, no experience in government and a front bench made up of people whose collective thinking power couldn't come up with a better slogan than "Let's turn this country around" - is better placed than the Prime Minister to deliver lower taxes, more services and all the rest of the Santa Claus wish-list the board was heard going on about.
Mr Thomas Harrison, a former member of AAofA spoke to journalists from his home in some hippy commune up in the hills this morning:
"I gave up at suicide-bombing jihadists. At the point where you could get people to accept, based on nothing more than your say so and a few dodgy quotes from an ancient book, that if they blew themselves up then they would get eternal paradise and, for some strange reason, a whole lot of women who know nothing about sex, I realised that we weren't going to win. What's the return on that investment? Gamble everything, literally everything, in the faint hope of an extremely unlikely but sensational pay off - always assuming that eternity with a whole bunch of giggling young women is your idea of a sensation. The lotto's got nothing on these guys. I even despair at the notion of what paradise would be like for people who think like that."
And it seems that it's not even the more extreme forms of belief that have driven previously committed atheists to apostasy. Ms Bianca Dyce, a gold member of AAofA and three time winner of Sceptic of the Year, explains:
"It was kids that did it for me. I was in journalism and PR, trying to make a living writing blogs and articles and anything really for the cause. And it was increasingly desperate. You could have the best facts, the most recent research, the most sensational nature photos and David Attenborough to explain it all and people just didn't care. We were barely scraping by in the office; we'd sometimes go weeks without a salary. Then I had kids and had to find something that paid the bills, so I sold my soul to the credulous. Now I make six figures more or less selling snake-oil."
"Nothing will stop ageing. We will get older, our skin will wrinkle and our hair will grey. But people want to believe that they can stop it if only they spend hard enough. Tell them it's got a miracle ingredient - better yet make it sound pseudo-scientific and call it a pro-vitamin - and you'll sell it by the barrel. None of it works. It never has. There are thousands of acres of cemeteries out there as evidence, but it doesn't stop people smearing their face with slightly tinted Sorbolene at $250 a litre every morning. How can you remain Atheist in the face of that kind of evidence?"
The demise of the Association is the latest in what seems to be becoming a series of collapses of organisations devoted to facts, reason, thought and honesty. It is even said that the Australian Academy of Sciences has had to get in a new PR company to address this challenge; and to get over the disaster of the nude Professors of Science calendar from a couple of years ago.
We wish them all the best.
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