Sir – In response to John White’s letter about the census, Helen Robertson points out that British society was built upon the Judaeo-Christian ethic.

Yes, but secular morality, as it has evolved in our social species, precedes and informs religious morality. We should indeed be proud of our ethics.

But it is hardly ethical if, in order to exaggerate the relative following of the major religions, she encourages non-religious people to tick either no box or any box at all other than a truthful ‘No religion’.

Roderick Taylor writes that it is illogical to tick ‘No religion’ unless one is convinced that all of life has arisen spontaneously without the help of a creator — which the universe might well have done.

Moreover, the sun, our star, is one of about 100,000,000,000 stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, which in turn is one of about 200,000,000,000 galaxies in our universe.

For those who think either that there is no creator or that it is vanishingly unlikely that any creator of all that would be concerned with the individual or collective lives of any of us or our ancestors as we have evolved on this planet over the last 4,000,000,000 years, then ‘No Religion’ is the honest answer.

Hubert Allen’s reference to quaint faith is applicable to many religious beliefs, only one of which can be true, but hardly applicable to the absence of belief in any of them! The odd idea that a belief in a god confers a happy eternal life, regardless of lifetime behaviour, means that it requires courage and honesty to escape religious belief.

But such escape is accompanied by great relief from contradictions. One of these is that his compassionate and merciful god could allow or influence the human and/or natural disasters that occur all too frequently.

Dane Clouston, Stadhampton