People have written to us with their experiences of religious faith and belief this century.

Amo has sent us his own view of religion at the end of the twentieth century:

My story isn't one based in the past but rather an ongoing one. I find it rather astonishing that so many people still believe in religion, in a God, in nationalism and that man is anything more than just another animal. Even people who are supposedly intelligent start talking about God like he exists for certain. I guess my surprise is that I came to England from Kenya, a foreign student, expecting to encounter a highly secular and advanced society that had dispensed with superstition and nonsense but found the contrary to my dismay and surprise. Don't get me wrong, there is a large secular cosmopolitan Britain which bases its belief system on evidence but there is a huge chunk of the country ( I feel it's about 75% ) and the world ( about 95% ) at large that doesn't. The things they believe in are so obviously completely ludicrous to my mind. I guess for a young man like me (25) the irrationality of humans can be a bit overwhelming. When I saw President Clinton at a prayer breakfast on the news with singing marines at his side, I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Mr Jayaram in Hong Kong talks about his experiences of caste and religion when he was growing up.

My name is N. Jayaram. The N stands for Nuggehally, the name of a village in Hassan district of Karnataka state in southern India. Most people in southern India tag the name of their ancestral native place, to their names. In my case I do not have a surname. My father has one -- Iyengar. It is the surname of a sub-caste of Brahmins. My father did not have it registered with my name and my brothers names because it had become infra dig in free India.

I was born some seven and a half years after independence. But even before independence, in what was then the Madras presidency in southern India in the early part of this century, there had been a movement to break the stranglehold of the upper castes over administration and justice. Naturally, in free India, there was an attempt at redressing centuries of oppression suffered by the lower castes. As a reaction, the upper castes tried on the one hand to band together and preserve their privileges and on the other hand to blend with the inexorable trend towards egalitarianism by selectively trying to de-emphasise the differences between themselves and the others.

My earliest awareness of my caste origins goes back to the time when I was in a primary school in my village. As an eight- or nine-year-old, I remember being chided by boys of more or less my own age for having shared some snacks prepared for a death ceremony in a family and therefore considered auspicious with boys from a different sub-caste or caste. I also remember being asked by a teacher in my school one fine morning when I perhaps appeared scruffy whether I had washed: she hastened to answer it herself by saying that as a Brahmin, I would, of course, have washed. She was from the same sub-caste as I was.

On another occasion, I was left out of a school annual day drama programme because the father of a girl who was on the cast of a play, and who happened to be from a different caste, objected to the possible physical proximity it would have entailed. As I grew older, I had more cause to lose faith in the caste system, seeing that my grandfather and many others like him, who believed in their inherent superiority by virtue of being Brahmins, were not in any way better intellectually or otherwise to people they looked down on.

When I was about 11 years old, I was moved from a local language medium school to an English medium one. Needless to say, I had trouble adjusting to the change but eventually I allowed it to turn my head, as it were, imbibing liberal Western ideas and, thanks to the inclusion of essays by such writers as Bertrand Russell in the curriculum, turned against religion and eventually became a staunch atheist. In secondary school one of my classmates and one in whose company I often ate my lunch, although never sharing any of mine with him or tasting his was a Muslim. I remember having called him names on one or two occasions, much to his displeasure. I had evidently picked up the abusive terms from brothers and friends. But those minor incidents, however stayed with me and later reinforced my abiding sadness over religious differences in India.

In my youth I went on to join in the activities of atheist organisations but eventually moved away, not because I ceased being an atheist -- I still remain one but because of what I believe is a realistic assessment that religions which have been around for centuries are not going to be dented too soon, although modern scientific and technological advances mean change has become accelerated now, telescoping centuries. I hope and believe that the strides in science and technology will eventually help humanity shed its prejudices but for the present, especially in light of the resurgence of religious strife throughout the world in the 1990s, the outlook for the early part of the 21st century, it seems to me, remains bleak.

Catherine Blaikie recounts her time spent at boarding school in New part of the harsh regime.

My name is Catherine Blaikie. I was born in 1938 in New Zealand and grew up among the barren and beautiful foothills of the South Island's Southern Alps. Generally speaking, this was a time of repression and conformity especially for those of us born female.

Our greatest prize, according to our elders, was to be nice and we carried our incenses before us on a velvet cushion while hatred and frustration burned hollow holes in our hearts. It was also a time of parents looking knowingly at each other and saying, "little pigs have big ears," and "children should be seen and not heard." Well, at the age of twelve I was packed up, with a multitude of regulation clothes and sent to boarding school, not for any academic excellence I never managed to display, but for no other reason than that my brother had gone before me.

So with my big pigs ears and knowing I could be seen and definitely not heard I was delivered to a small seaside city where I would spend the next three years incarcerated in the clutches of maniacal madness.

The school was an all girls' school, with the boarding house sharing the same beautifully treed and gardened grounds. There were approximately one hundred girls of varying backgrounds, degrees of sophistication and academic abilities all living together during the three school terms of each year. Evil flourishes in such closed environments where, because there were insufficient checks and balances, the style and disposition of the headmistress had full reign. We were not physically or sexually abused. The abuse we suffered was psychological and emotional; just as painful, just as damaging; just as violent.

The headmistress, who lived with the boarders, was a small, petite, elegant woman with flashing brown eyes, darkest brown hair cut short and a head too large in proportion to the rest of her body. She had a seductive and charming smile and demure, and charmed the teachers, the parents and Board of Governors around her every finger.

Prayers were a daily feature of our life. Prayers every morning at school assembly, prayers for the boarders every night after the evening meal. The latter were compulsory, though this was later modified to only those who wished to attend. Because the more fervent of us, with our nerves rubbed red and raw parodied the inflections and, in some cases, speech impediments of the house mistress who led the prayers, these were discontinued altogether. The teacher's sanity was deemed more important than our dubious and meagre supplications to the Lord. Sunday night prayers, however, continued term in and term out. What a nightmare they were and guaranteed to frighten young impressionable girls from prayer for the rest of their lives.

Our headmistress's angry powerful tread could be heard each Sunday night coming down the long passage well before her presence swept into the Senior Common Room. We all sat arrayed around the room, our nervous anxiety tainting the air with its peculiar acrid smell, our pulses racing, our sweaty palms melting together and snakes twirling and tossing in the pits of our stomachs.

Prayers. This was a time of painful and unbearable heart wrenching misery, the degree of which depended on how many rules had been broken during the week, how angry the headmistress was and how much cruel malevolence she would punch into us, innocent and guilty alike for these misdemeanors were always dealt with before prayers began.

It is hard to know what God, in His loving kindness thought about all this. I'm sure tears were wept for our skewered and rigid society where cruelty and shame were the norm, where little pigs had big ears, where children were mere pawns, okay to be seen but definitely not okay to be heard, and where girls must always be nice.

Her sharp tongued lashings and burning, angry brown eyes jarred and ricocheted around the room injuring and violently shaming girls to themselves and to each other. Girls with no words to fight back, girls crawling with the guilt of generations heaped upon their rigid shoulders, girls innocent of wrong doing yet carrying the collective guilt of all, girls stifled from birth unable to speak of their despair and constant unhappiness.

We were like sitting ducks waiting to be picked off at will by the master shooter, this charming monster of madness, leaving our hearts to bleed, our broken spirits to mourn; the booty of another successful night of emotional mayhem. The split between the inner realty of our lives and the outer persona was born at an early age. Upper lips were starched and stiffened, laughter was hollow, silent tears drenched our pillows and focused our rage in the years to come.

After the tirade had subsided, after many tears had been shed, after blushing shame drained from our faces and hardened in our hearts, it was time to pray. "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty." The prayers had begun. The end was in sight. Hell on earth was hopefully stilled until prayers next Sunday when we would all sit again in this ambit of madness, but more realistically, stilled hopefully, until tomorrow".