"Why should the rights of gay couples to adopt impinge on the rights of Christian adoption agencies to bar gay couples from using their service?"

As an atheist, would this give me the right to bar Christians and other religious people from, say, coming into my hotel?

David Jones, Loughborough, UK

As a member of the Evangelical Alliance Joel Edwards can have whatever views he chooses about homosexuality (and Evangelicals are divided on this as a visit to the Accepting Evangelicals website will show). However, as a member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission he will have to uphold the laws respecting the rights of gay and lesbian people.

I can't see any reason why he can't be committed to doing both - but only time will tell.

andrew holden, Oxford, UK

The current liberal society is caused by religion in the same way that the law is caused by murderers and thieves. It is a reaction against religion not a positive side effect. Please stop trying to portray religion as a solution to anything, it's not, it's a problem.

Colin, Cheshire,

Bob - could your argument not be turned on its head?

Why should the gay rights movement have the freedom to push its agenda on the rest of society when that agenda infringes the rights of those who do not agree with it? Why should the rights of gay couples to adopt impinge on the rights of Christian adoption agencies to bar gay couples from using their service? Why should the gay rights agenda infringe upon the rights of Christian foster carers who do not wish to push that agenda on to the children they care for?

The rule that 'my freedom stops where it impinges on your freedom' is clearly not an adequate measure to deal with such complex issues.

What has happened recently in the UK is that the State has decided that the rights of gay people are MORE important than the rights of Christians and other who do not agree with the gay agenda.

Andrew Brown, derby, UK

Good to see the mob howling for the blood of Christians again. How dare these Christian vermin express any dissent to the new dogma that nothing may be said about sodomy other than in tones of warmest approval? Let them either toe the line or be abused for 'intolerance', dragged into court at every opportunity, denied charitable status, and vilified for their Nazi tendencies -- every powerless and unpopular minority is Nazi, of course -- in every newspaper in the land.

Seriously, how is passing laws allowing pressure groups to persecute those who disagree with them anything but hateful and oppressive. We all know what the Christians believe. If this country really cannot tolerate Christians saying what every Englishman believed in 1950, then we are in deep trouble.

Enough of this ideological hate. No-one is interfering with gays. The same cannot be said about Christians, sadly.

Roger Pearse, Ipswich,

and make sure we also protect those whose religious beliefs include ripping out hearts of human sacrifices, beating their wives, stoning adulterers or prejudicing against certain ethnicities. ALL religious expression must be protected including discrimination against homosexuals. As mentioned, if we let go of our religious heritage we will descend in the moral chaos and societal disintegration that we see in the countries of Scandinavia and Japan where, according to some polls, the majority of people do no longer have a belief in the one true god(s) of their region, who are of course the source of all our morality.

Willian Clifford, Rome,

The Secular Society seems to think that Christians (and others whose morality does not fit with the current politically correct version) should not have the right to express their views, or have their views respresented on important national bodies. How intolerant! I thought that tolerance was about accepting others who had views different than your own, not forcing them to believe what you believe.

Andrew Brown, derby, UK

Does Dr Sacks really mean that we had a 'shared moral code' which is now gone? He's talking about shared ethics, surely?

As an atheist, I share many of my ethics with the religious but I've never believed in any of the gods the religious propose and so I don't share their moral codes. Afterall, the source of, and reason for, their moral codes is their various gods, not humanism.

We can arrive at similar ethics but from different sources. There are differences though, as debates about abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, and homosexuality, to name a few, show very vividly.

This needs to be made very clear as I don't want to living under restrictions which I view as irrational by virtue of their religious source. In the reverse case, the religious have the choice to restrict themselves under a secular society but not others. That seems like a tolerant, diverse, and free situation to me.

David Jones, Loughborough, UK

Surely the very first thing that anyone learns about rights is that the freedom to act must be constrained before it infringes the freedom of others; "my right to swing my first stops at the end of your nose". Even the most evangelical of evangelicals would surely accept under most circumstances.

But when it comes to homosexuality there is a curious blindspot. Suddenly it is perfectly acceptable to recommend that others should not be allowed, for example, the freedom to marry, based on ones own "freedom" of religious conviction.

There are few other spheres and on few other topics where such a basic rule as this -- that my freedom does not include the freedom to impinge on your freedom -- could be so patently, willfully ignored. They may not consider themselves actively homophobic, but the very existence of this moral blindspot indicates a deeply entrenched prejudice; it's a homophobia so deep that groups like the Evangelical Alliance can't even see it in themselves.

Bob Churchill, Worcester, UK