I'VE read the debate about Jesus in your letters section with interest, and thought I may as well add my thoughts. And I'm not very impressed with the arguments on either side.

On the one hand we have the Socialist Party of Great Britain members, with their ludicrous claim that Jesus never existed.

Looks like some people in the SPGB have a bad case of wanting to rewrite history to suit their own beliefs. There's enough evidence (most of it quoted by your Christian correspondents) for us to be pretty certain that someone called Jesus lived about 2000 years ago and went around campaigning on the theme that spirituality was about loving other people rather than about following various rituals and dogmas. This Jesus later got executed, probably because he was perceived as a threat by the ruling Sadducees.

At this point the tables turn and most of your Christian correspondents seem to lose most of their logic and common sense, when they presume that evidence for the existence of Jesus as a man is the same thing as evidence for some supernatural involvement, involving a resurrection.

It's not. And the evidence for the latter is decidedly unconvincing. There also seems to be an implicit assumption in many of these letters that having some faith or spirituality in your life is impossible unless you hold certain opinions about the historical events surrounding Jesus's life. That also strikes me as ludicrous. And to cap all this, Normal Gardner appears to believe that SPGB members giving their views in the Citizen letters page amounts to persecution of Christians ("Christians always pray for those who persecute them", 11 Jan).

Ken Blackwell (18 Jan) makes the best arguments for Christianity, pointing out that Christians are 'a great impact for good in the world'. Unfortunately, this good often seems highly selective. For example I've never noticed large numbers of Christians and Churches being active in the environmental movement. (I guess it's easy to overlook what may be the most serious problem affecting the future of humanity when the Bible doesn't mention it...). And this 'good' also has to be balanced by the fact that Christians and Churches also do a lot of bad things. Most obvious example - you only have to look across the Atlantic to see Christianity being used as the basis for the most awful right wing politics.

I come to this debate as someone who used to attend Church regularly, but no longer. The reason? Well in my experience there are two kinds of churches. Firstly there's the evangelical (and some more traditional catholic ones). These churches essentially treat Jesus as a way of promoting prejudice against against any lifestyle that doesn't fit certain traditional, you could say -Victorian/English ideals. Most obviously this appears in attitudes towards sexuality in general and gays in particular. So I guess I'll remain as someone who sees life in a spiritual way, would like to think of myself as Christian, and tries to follow roughly the ideas put forward by Jesus, but who has come to the sad conclusion that that's best done without the 'help' of any church. And as for most of your Christian and Socialist Party of Great Britain correspondents? Well so far all they are doing is demonstrating that both sides are as blind as each other.

Simon Robinson Bowerham