REPLYING to my remarks regarding the teachers of religion, Princess Diana and hell, the Rev Kevin Logan (Letters, August 28), misses my point. I wasn't angry because these two miserable creatures 'told of such a place.'

My main point was that they suggested that someone such as Diana would have gone there, that they were frightening children, denigrating her and filling the children's heads with such rubbish - and I mean rubbish.

No, Mr Logan, hell does not exist, it is a left-over from the times of primitive man who could not even explain thunder and lightning - when gods and demons and devils lurked in many places, waiting to claim those who didn't conform to what was taught at the time.

Hell was the ultimate sanction but to not only believe in it but to propagate it in these enlightened times shows a high level of superstition on one hand and a low level of thinking on the other. I agree with Mr Logan when he writes that we highlight the dangers of our present life with the Highway Code, anti-drug slogans, safe sex and an abundance of other dangers, all of which are tangible. Hell, on the other hand, is just about as tangible and proveable as is the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden. And as regards the afterlife, there's as much proof of this as there is of hell.

My mother taught us that there is a hell, but that it wasn't in any afterlife. Hell, she said, is the life we make for ourselves and others on this earth during this one and only existence if we don't help and treat others as we would expect others to treat us.

And so, as Mr Logan ends, is Diana in such a place? His answer: 'God only knows.'

But I know he is wrong - hell doesn't exist and even if it did, Diana had done nothing which would have consigned her to such a place.

ALBERT J MORRIS, Clement View, Nelson.

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