Always and forever. You’ve got to tell lies to your children as they are growing up because the truth would destroy them. They won’t be ready for the truth until they are much older.

And what truths are we talking about? Do you want to tell a four-year-old about Hiroshima?

To give them a chance, you’ve got to lie to them, constantly. And as they get older, you’ve got to tell them that lies are a part of life. You’ve got to protect them from the shirt-lifters, lying politicians, and most of all, the charlatans of which there are many.

I took my oldest boy to a boxing club at too far young an age and he was terrified. But he was a stubborn kid and asked me to take him back two years later. He was just like his dad, loads of style but lacking in aggression to be any good.

Protect them from lying politicians and charlatans by lying?

No, no, no, no. You don't need to tell a 4 year old about hiroshima. You give a child the truth in small doses. If a young child asks about sex, you give it a generalised, simple story, that is sufficient to answer the question truthfully without going into sodomy, bestiality and so on.

Sally has it bang to rights. Telling your children lies makes things worse, not better.

We differ. I’ve taught my children that there are times in life when you’ve got to tell lies, whether it’s on a CV, or an interview with an employer.

My advice doesn’t seem to have done them any harm, they are all well fixed in life.

It didn’t do me any harm either; and I’m going to be harsh – I lied my way through a large part of my life to improve my ability to provide for my children.

Regrets? Rien.

Given the choice, I think I would much prefer the peace-loving religious Buddhist monks, to the hideous repressive Commie regime which has made their lives a misery for so long, with it's spiteful and hateful indoctrination, together with it's almost total disregard for decency and human rights.

Blimey, how do you respond to that?

With all due respect, I think you are probably merely a debunker.

As regards lying to children, I too think this is a bad thing. But there are ways of telling the truth. You don't have to have the whole caboodle all at once.

My son had to have an appendix operation when he was seven. He asked if it would hurt. We told him having the operation would not hurt as he would be asleep, but it would hurt afterwards, but had to be done to make him better, and that the Drs and Nurses would look after him and make sure it did not hurt too much. We did not lie to him. He was fine with this.

As regards Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy, left to myself I would not tell a child about these other than on the basis of it being all 'pretend'. Why on earth should they believe anything else I say if I lie (and am proud to have been lying) to them about this?

As regards Christinaity, we always told him what we believed, took him to church and sent him to church schools. As he got older we also said that some people don't believe it and that he has to make up his own mind. (because to be a Christian you have to make a conscious choice, it is not something that just 'happens' to you by an accident of birth, such as Islam). He went to church voluntarily until he was 15, then asked us if he could stop going, we said he could if he wished. He is now 30 and an agnostic, tending towards 'I think there is a God but I'm not sure yet' type of agnosticism.

Peadophile priests are of course behaving in a wicked manner and I personally think they should be removed from the priesthood and treated according to the laws of the land. However the Pope sees it differently. But how the Pope deals with these people does not have any bearing on whether Christianity is true or not, does it? If certain of its practitioners don't behave in a way worthily of it, it does not make the whole thing lies.

That's my take anyway.

My problem with all of this religious stuff is that belief is being taught as certainty and that the things you believe don't need to be true, you just need to believe them.

An example; Christians believe that Jesus is the son of God. Muslims believe he is a prophet but not the son of God. They cannot both be right therefore at least one group of many millions of people is simply wrong, the entire basis of their faith is flawed.

Conflict lies here because millions of Christians believe that millions of Muslims are wrong and millions of muslims believe that millions of Christians are wrong.

This is not good.

Again, that's different. There is a huge difference between what goes on between you and your children, and what goes on between your children and the outside world.

What you tell your children, especially when they are young, should be honest. Later on, you explain to them that other people will not be always as truthful as you are to them, and that they must learn to dissimulate when necessary.

Well, isn't that what all scientists do? We sift out the 'bunk', the rubbish. We seperate the wheat from the chaff.

God is jealous, isn't he? I'm sure that I read that in the bible. I consider jealousy a sin.

I think you are becoming unhappy with the line that this discussion is taking.

All I am doing is trying to establish what is real and what is not. We agree that the church is intrinsically corrupt, and that if the heirachy of the church is not actually sodomising children, it is actively abetting them or passively enabling them to continue in their ways.

So we don't need the pope, we don't need the priests et al, and we don't need the structure of the church.

What I say is that if all that is corrupt and unnecessary, then anything that comes from it is suspect and open to question. This corrupt church wrote the bible, and created the concept of Jesus out of the older figure of Mithras as someone spotless to front their 'business'. We know that the number of the beast isn't 666, it's 616, because we have uncovered a very old copy of Revelations, which gives it as 616. We know that Mary wasn't described as a virgin in the older texts, because we can read that it says 'young girl,' not virgin.

So, my question to you would be why, since so much of the christian faith is built on shifting sand and constructed out of calculated lies, why do you need to cling to the last shards? Why not wipe it all clean, and do good things because it's the right thing to do, to love thy neighbour not because it will get you in with an old man in a beard, but because it's what you should do?

Shouldn't everyone be a debunker, to attempt to set out what is true, and drive out what is false?

I think that's all good and proper, and I think you treated your son properly, and considering that you are quite a dedicated christian, your restraint in not indoctrinating him does you credit.

As regards the church, well christianity stems from the Catholic church. Like it or not, all the christian sects are like twigs and branches growing from the catholic trunk.

The roots of christianity are all catholic, in the sense that that's all there was. We can clearly see that the whole catholic church is riddled with the crime of paedophilia and the rape, abuse and torture of children by priests, nuns, monks and worse.

We know that there is no serious effort by any of the heirachy to get this stopped, or to cut out the rotten wood. In fact they conspire to cover it up, and worse still they conspire to make it worse by moving paedo priests around the parishes. Finally of course we have a pope who also aids and abets, so much so that he has made it an excommunicable offense to tell anyone about a priest that is in the habit of raping children.

This is the pope 'seeing it differently?

Of course there are people who will turn around and say 'Oh but there are so many good priests.' Once, possibly this argument might have held some weight, but these days everyone, but everyone has been told what goes on, and at that point, those priests that do nothing are quite simply enablers involved in a conspiracy of silence to ensure that the abuse goes on. That makes them GUILTY AS HELL.

My question to you is, how can the twigs and the branches stay up when the trunk and roots are rotten to the core?

Spot on. If you are an atheist, then you are only a hair's breadth in difference between a muslim, a jew or a christian, because you only believe in one less god than they do.

Of course you are right. There are, god only knows how many religions in the world, and almost every one tries to kid us all that they are the only one, the only true path to god, heaven and so on, and all along that path there are the priests, taking your money, and worse.

But the Pope and Catholic Church are NOT the trunk and roots. God is.

TBH, I couldn't care less about the Catholic Church, . I think the Pope has behaved very wrongly in his attitude to paedophile priests; I also think the Archbishop of Canterbury is a wishy-washy intellectual who is not even sure if he is a Christian (he has been initiated as a Druid!) and does not offer much in the way of leadership to Anglican Christians. None of this to me makes any difference to my Christian faith, nor make me believe it less. These man-made offices are precisely that, man-made, and held by people who are as imperfect as the rest of us.

I think a Christian leader should be someone who is a shining light and example to the rest of us (like the Archbishop of York) and many, many church leaders are, but as I say again, even if they are not, that does not make Christianity untrue.