INn reply to Angie Rowland (Letters, August 23), I can honestly say that I love the gay community and have friends in it.

It is perfectly honourable and good to have deep, loving relationships with people of the same sex and we have examples in the Bible of the relationship between David and Jonathan ("thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women" 2 Samuel 1.26) and Jesus (Lazarus and the Apostle John).

What the Bible teaches as wrong is for people of the same sex to have sexual intercourse.

I am totally against gay-bashing and the failure of many in the straight community who can only condemn gay people.

On the other hand, straight people ought not to be made to feel that because they are not gay, they are abnormal.

Many people who have found happiness and fulfilment in marriage relationships find it difficult to see what the gay community is shouting about.

As regards Angie's accusations re the persecution of the followers of witchcraft by the church, this began with the Romans when they were still pagans.

Witchcraft was never a religion on its own but, in western Europe, part of the wider Celtic religion which was, in the main, animist. Gods were believed to dwell in fountains, oak trees, stones and so on.

What the Romans objected to were the human sacrifices, sexual orgies and cruelty to children and animals that were part of Celtic religious and witchcraft practices.

Such practices are often associated with witchcraft in parts of Africa and Haiti today.

All this was eventually superseded not by legislation but through the spread of the Christian gospel.

People found a better way in Christianity which taught we should love one another and expressed this by founding schools, hospitals, and caring for the poor and sick in a way the pagan religions and witchcraft never did.

-Rev John Webster, Hove