Sir, I may not be alone in detecting a case of having your Christmas cake and eating it in David Aaronovitch’s defence of carol-singing atheists (Comment, Dec 20) and accompanying letters. I find it hard to respect anyone who proclaims their atheism with missionary zeal, and then happily joins in singing such lines as “O Come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord”, however agreeable they may find the experience.

If you choose atheism you must surely have the courage and integrity to accept the consequences — religious, cultural, social or otherwise — or risk being labelled a hypocrite. The militant atheists who fought religion under communism here in Eastern Europe inflicted some pretty appalling sufferings. But they did at least have the virtue of being principled — you would not have found them singing carols, even if they thought no one was watching.

Jonathan Luxmoore
Catholic News Service
Warsaw

Sir, When I was growing up in north-west Lancashire in the 1960s, any curmudgeonly elderly person (male or female) was labelled an “old faggot”, just as the word is used in Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl (“Radio 1 reverses decision to censor Pogues hit”, Dec 19). It did not refer to their sexual proclivities. Would the BBC not better serve us, in its capacity as moral guardian, by more closely considering the lyrics of the songs of the rap/gangster genre it plays?

It is in any case ironic that the BBC was willing to keep the word “arse” in the song. The Pogues were originally Pogue Mahone, Gaelic for “kiss my arse” — the abbreviation having been forced upon the band in the 1980s when the BBC got wind of the name’s derivation.

Mark Cairns
Alfreton, Derbyshire

Sir, A lifelong non-believer and I were walking past Vienna’s Stephansdom. He resolutely remained outside in the drizzle while I entered to commune with the architecture and art that is part of my European Judeo-Christian heritage. I’m not sure if he was kept out by the suspicion that God might indeed zap him, or by the obsessive intellectual punctiliousness that Libby Purves advocates (comment, Dec 18).

Not believing in Puff the Magic Dragon never stopped me from singing the song. And I’m sure Mr Dawkins sings the entire first line of the National Anthem as lustily as I did at recent Rugby World Cup matches. My God, it’s liberating.

Mark Boylan
London W14

Sir, So Nick Clegg has never heard of Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. This ignorance, for one of his age group, is on a par with the High Court judge who asked “Who are the Beatles?”

Stephen Osborne
Winchester

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