Let us pray for freedom of speech

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday November 13 2005

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What a brave piece by Carol Sarler (Can I still hate the Pope? News, last week). She could have added the horrific acts committed by paedophile priests to the crimes committed in the name of religion, not least murder, by Hindu and Muslim, Arab and Jew as well as Catholic and Protestant over hundreds of years.
Jem Cook
Marlborough
Wiltshire

Carol Sarler may be surprised to learn that a Christian minister agrees broadly with her on contraception, the response to 'devils' in children, violence towards gays, religion-based censorship, terrorism in the name of religion and the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.

Where we part company is over her desire to hate the thinker of objectionable thoughts. Hatred of another is integral to the dehumanising of the other, which precedes all the wrongs Sarler opposes. To 'yell fury' at those we disagree with leads only to deafness all round and the political, social and religious ghettoisation that Nick Cohen, elsewhere in the same issue, fears.
The Rev Julyan Drew
Newlyn
Cornwall

Carol Sarler demonstrates why the Religious Hatred Bill is necessary. Its point is not to ban satire but to prevent the easy use of generalisations about a faith that allows hatred of it to crop up; generalisations, for example, about the Vatican and its policy on condoms causing harm in Africa. As the United Nations Aids report for 2003 shows, four of the five countries in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest rates of HIV infection are Catholic nations.
Robert Bennett
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion

A huge cheer for Carol Sarler on why she hates faith-based bigotry and faith-based bigots. Can you please print this somewhere in The Observer every week and dare anyone to challenge it in court. The key line is: 'Beliefs, political or religious, are a matter of choice...'
David PJ Smith
Saffron Walden
Essex

Carol Sarler says religious belief is 'a matter of choice' but the vast majority of believers inherit their beliefs from their parents. Salman Rushdie once said that most religious people are not particularly theological. Yet they are good, despite the frequently malevolent nature of their texts, doctrines and leadership.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool

I find I can't 'hate' the Pope; he's just a common or garden madman, as is anyone who believes in the existence of a supernatural being for which there is not an iota of evidence. Or, as Richard Dawkins puts it, those who can only explain the organised complexity of life by posing some mysterious, super-organised complexity not amenable to analysis.

And just think: the leaders of both the US and Britain believe in such a supernatural being and, worse, the former believes he has a direct line to him.
David Millar
Edinburgh

Last week, we published a letter stating that 'the United Nations Aids report for 2003 shows four of the five countries in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest rates of HIV infection are Catholic nations'. According to the UN, the five sub-Saharan nations with the lowest percentages of adults living with Aids as at the end of 2003 were Mauritania, Senegal, the Gambia, Niger and Madagascar. According to the US State Department's International Religious Freedom reports, four of these have almost entirely Muslim populations, while Madagascar has no state religion and an estimated Catholic population of 28 per cent. The 10 sub-Saharan countries with the highest proportions of adults living with Aids include Lesotho (29 per cent) and Malawi (14 per cent), with Catholic populations exceeding 60 per cent.