SOME of your correspondents are bewildered as to why in the year 1999 (of the Christian era) our children are still being instructed in religious propaganda.

It is because the archaic law of blasphemous libel is still on the statute book even though the law commission proposed its abolition in 1982.

We still have holy inquisitors of the faith calling at every school in the country to make sure that young trusting minds are indoctrinated with false teachings. In answer to 'British citizen' (Star, October 7) we are a Christian nation because we have no choice. Freedom is the essence of all education. A child will grow in freedom if it is taught the truths about religion. No service is rendered to religion, to education or to a child by teaching it discarded creeds which, if it is intelligent, it will reject at the earliest possible age.

Thankfully, we are freeing ourselves from the creedal chains that have held us in darkness for centuries, we are now in 'liberation mode'.'

Unfortunately, many teenagers are turning their backs on all those whom they consider misled them at a time when they had no means of resisting them.

Only by exposure to a wide spectrum of learning can we prevent the new generation from being led up the garden path and left to make its own way back.

True religion is to give service, to ignore all the elaborate phrase-making of priestrcraft and to live and honest, unselfish life, desiring to help the world in which we live and so be true to the great supreme law behind all life of which we are all an integral part.

A secularist (name and address supplied).

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.