[West Ender]

I think a lot of us feel that way. I was brought up Catholic but, though my mother was of that denomination and came from an old pre-reformation English Catholic family, my father was an agnostic (previously brought up as a Baptist). Through my dad I learned, first of all, how evil and nonsensical religious intolerance is. He had witnessed at first hand the intolerance of his family and his adoptive parents when he married my mum and he treated all those with similar views with scorn. He never questioned my mother's beliefs or my educational indoctrination by the sisters at Paddock House but he taught me to be rational.

I married in the Catholic church, though my husband was not of that persuasion, but I had already begun to have serious doubts, not particularly about the Catholic faith but about Faith in general. My first 2 children were baptised Catholic but I must admit it was more in the cause of tradition than devotion on my part. By the time they were ready for school I had no faith and seeing the evils of inter-religious bigotry, particularly as in Northern Ireland, I did not bring them up in any denomination at all.

My third child was not christened. At the age of 7 she started to go to the local Methodist Sunday School, because she wanted to. That was fine by me. After a couple of years she quite fancied being a Catholic and went to mass a couple of times, then she decided she would rather like to be a Jew but we didn't have a synagogue nearby so she gave up the idea. After that she became a devoted Humanist. In a way that has lasted but today, at the age of 30, she is just a very caring person who puts people first.

I love reading the Bible. I find the stories fascinating as a history of the world, as it was known at the time, put into allegory. I have no quarrel with those who take every word as verbatim because, like my dad, I believe in tolerance. I can pick holes in any theory of the Creationists but I would not do so in order to convert them to my philosophy and I won't be converted to theirs.