Lack of faith in multiculturalism

I read Harry Bell’s column (The Rage Of Multiculturalism, Harry Bell, Kentish Gazette, November 3) with much interest and also the reply on the letters page from Richard Norman (We Can Embrace Our Diversity, Letters and Opinion. Kentish Gazette, November 10).

As I understand it multiculturalism comes in many packages and I embrace most of them with pleasure. Clothes, music, dance – how I love flamenco.

And nobody minds if I prefer to dress as I do like a tramp and if I don’t like rap and prefer jazz and classical music and hard rock that’s cushty as well and the same applies to dance.

But, as everyone knows, it is different religions that cause the problem.

Or rather one in particular. I am an atheist but have had many email conversations with clerics who understand that only they and atheists take religion seriously.

For instance the wife of a friend asked me what to put in the religion box on a job application saying that

she always put Church of England.

I asked her if she believed in God and she replied obviously not.

And then there was a long to and fro between me and a monk which ended when I sent him a copy of Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene.

An Olympic gymnast who has mocked Islam has been made to make a grovelling apology in this secular country of ours in the context of Gerry Springer the opera which pokes fun at Christianity and The Life of Brian.

So multiculturalism is fine but not

when it comes to book burning, not when it comes to a forced acceptance by the self-appointed elite that one mustn’t, for instance, see a Danish cartoon mocking Islam and not when journalists in Paris are killed.

If objecting to this is to object to multiculturalism then I object to it. If any believer wants to satirise my atheism feel free. We can have a nice friendly chat. Ian Macmillan Sandwich Road, Ash, Canterbury