""What I find with spiritual study is this: it doesn't supply a set of pat answers or dogma or a set of rules...rather it encourages asking a lot more questions and considering all kinds of new possibilities.""

You might have come away with a totally different set of experiences, had you been taught by the Jesuit brothers who ran the Catholic grammar school, where I suffered my secondary education.

Not only did they not encourage asking questions. They actively discouraged them with beatings and banishment from the class.

Why do newborn babes, who die unbaptised go to limbo, when they cannot possibly have sinned? Caned for that one until his arm was too tired to continue.

One example will suffice of what happened virtually every time I dared to open my mouth.

I spent most of the five years outside in the corridor during Religious Instruction (that is what it was called then, not Education) classes.

I'll never forget, the day the GCE "O" Level results came in and I, based on what I had learned in church and at primary school, had passed the exam.

To my dying day I'll never forget the look on that bastard's face. I thought he was going to choke to death before he had finished.

He told the head that I must have cheated, but the invigilator scotched that one.

Don T.