AS an atheist I admire your paper for being representative enough to include letters from different points of view on religious beliefs, and for also regularly carrying the excellent articles of non-believer Julian Cole.

My mother was a Protestant, my father a Catholic, so I was designated as of "a mixed marriage" in the Catholic catechism of those days, and never allowed to forget it.

Back when religion dominated, and ruled, the minds of people by terror of the promise of an "eternal hell" to any who "strayed from their teachings", it is obvious the ban on condoms is based on the assumption that more children will be born to Catholic families.

I am an evolutionist. I was not "made" by any "god", as they forced us to believe.

I am the result of millions of years of evolution, as science has now adequately demonstrated.

To me, sex is an in-born natural need that explains our presence here. It is not, as the priests teach, a thing of which to be ashamed.

Neither is sex something they have any right to have control over uniquely, as when it was forbidden except when one had paid a priest for a "certificate" and a ceremony. Thankfully, in this country, those days are gone.

I regard the religious who worship at the image of a near-naked man nailed to a cross, and try to give this alleged 2,000-year-old murder significance to modern life, absurd and sick.

At Protestant and Catholic schools teaching was based on fear. I hope it isn't now, and I admire the freedom the young generation have achieved - much better than the parent generation I knew, who were victims of those brutal times.

D Dawson,

Clifton,

York.

Updated: 11:16 Thursday, April 21, 2005