I have a rooted dislike of all extreme fundamentalist aspects of all religions. I’ve seen fundamentalism kill so many people. I’ve seen it make people’s lives a hell on earth. The moment you start moving along that road, in whatever religion, you begin destroying the human spirit and you take away responsibility. You know: “It’s God’s will.” The number of people who have killed having lumped the responsibility on to a deity is frightening. That is when you really, actually feel fear on a battlefield — when you see people who are about to try to kill you because they have the light of God in their eyeballs.

ISABEL ALLENDE
Novelist

I was brought up in a very Catholic, conservative, patriarchal environment. My grandmother, however, was always fascinated with the spirit world and she had seances, which were forbidden by the Church. I don’t believe in God as I was taught, but I do believe that maybe there is some kind of incredible network, a connection, a sort of spider web, or many spider webs that connect things, places, events. I think that everything has cause and effect, that we don’t live long enough to see the relationship between events and the connections. But they are there, and they are magical. I believe that everything I do, even the bad thoughts — or the good thoughts — comes back somehow.

MELVYN BRAGG
Broadcaster and author

The core of religion is something that I’m much more sympathetic to than I’ve ever been since I was blindly taken up with it when I was a kid. There are two or three things that matter in religion. One is to do with the beginning of things. The argument over the past few years particularly has been rehearsed to bits, but if you believe there was a creator then you have to believe that there’s a force out there, a guiding intelligence of a certain sort, out of which we all come. If you believe there’s a creator then you have to believe that what follows is designed by that creator. And again, the more that’s found out, the more you see . . . asteroids and eggshells are intimately related to each other: how they’re structured, how they’re formed. All these things have a deep and profound similarity, and that would accord with a religious idea.

And then — and this is a difficult one, I think — not only is there a creator and a design but there is a creator who has a design on us, on humankind, and his design is to give us free will so that we can eventually achieve a moral perfection. That’s the hardest one to accept. It does seem to me, though, that occasionally coming into the planet — rather like that asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago — are certain people so radically different in what they say that they do seem to bring messages.

DENIS HEALEY
Politician

When my father died I remember the clergyman saying to my mother something like, “Don’t worry, you’ll be meeting him again soon”, and that seemed to me slightly shocking. And Mother didn’t really believe it, although when we got back to her house it was the first time I ever remember seeing her crying. I cry like a fish all the time, but Mother cried very rarely.

When she died, at the age of 99, I was conscious of my own loss. But in the last two or three years there was a very rapid deterioration, and I didn’t feel a great sense of loss then. In some ways I felt more when one of my best friends died. He’d broken his back in a minor motor accident, and had had a very difficult period for the last 15 years of his life. Some of my friends who’ve been religious have lost their religion when they’ve been hit by a blow like that. They feel God cannot be all-powerful and all-good if he lets this happen. I have never been tormented by that because I’ve never believed in an all-powerful personal god.

JOHN HUMPHRYS
Broadcaster

I didn’t ever say “I do not believe in God”, because I’m not that certain. I am the most appalling, wishy-washy agnostic you will ever meet. I find it terribly difficult . . . but if there is absolutely nothing, no guiding force, no moral guiding force or immoral guiding force for that matter, what is conscience? Why do we alone among species have this thing called conscience, and why do some of us make a reasonable living out of beating old ladies over the head and nicking their handbags and some of us don’t? It’s not just for the survival of the species, is it? Loads of species survive and they do dreadful things to each other all the time, not just occasionally. We do dreadful things occasionally, of course, like the Holocaust, but other species survive and make a habit of eating each other routinely.

EDNA O’BRIEN
Writer

I had told my favourite nun I was going to be a nun. I was a bit in love with her. And I began to fast and pray even more than normal. I was always fasting, always praying, gargling with salt and water to purify myself for God. I came home for the long summer holiday, and I had never really gone to dances or anything because I thought it was wrong. I thought everything to do with romance and sex — this was at 15 or 16 years of age — was sinful.

But I went to a dance and met somebody and had a kiss. And it was so exciting and so ecstatic that when I went back in and danced with this man I realised, of course, that I had betrayed my soul. I had sinned against God and against my vow of a vocation.

I didn’t become a nun, and I forget how I slithered out of it, but I saw that there had to be a choice between wanting the kiss or remaining faithful and chaste. I have had very few love affairs, for the record! So it wasn’t an intellectual departure, it wasn’t founded on anything, only fear — the fear that I had transgressed.

SUSIE ORBACH
Psychotherapist

I think one of the extraordinary things about psychoanalysis is the capacity that one has to juggle contradictory ideas, which isn’t to say that one is being a fake and not choosing. But at the same time as one understands the argument for atheism, which I embrace, I also understand the argument for a spiritual connection — it’s just that I wouldn’t describe it in the terms in which Jung would. I would describe it as what people create together, and their understanding of their relationship to others and their relationship to nature. I think that does reside in us and I think it is very, very moving.

CLARE SHORT
Politician

Religion is all about what is right and what is wrong, both for the world order and for your own life, and so is politics. Being involved in politics is to stand up for what is right, so the two were just part and parcel of the same quest. In the way I grew up it would be hard to think (and I know this sounds terrible) that a Tory could be a Christian. I know better now, and it wasn’t that I was ever taught to criticise others — but it was the values we had, and clearly we had to be right. We knew people like us were often not victorious, when you look at history, but you have to stand up for what’s right no matter how long it takes. That was just part of the politics and part of the religion.