AT a time when our freedoms are being eroded, right, left and centre (and how grateful will today’s children be towards us for that in 20 years' time?) I feel that Jeremy Smith (Man About Town) is being a little harsh and hasty in his condemnation of the city centre’s street preachers.

It goes without saying that they are scarcely the personification of sanity and that their buffoonery is counter-productive, but is that really any skin off his nose?

I recall asking a rather obnoxious campus crusader why, if his beliefs were absolutely and exclusively valid, idiots like him were selected to propagate them. No-one in the room, including his slightly more moderate co-religionists leaped to his defence.

Jesus of Nazareth, if indeed an historical personage, would be eternally spinning in his grave at the historical course of Christianity – overwhelmingly a most grotesque distortion of him and his purported teachings, a fact which in itself must cast serious doubt on their legitimacy at any level.

The Buddha, for instance, nothing more than a brilliant human being, largely managed to prevent his doctrine from being hijacked by cranks, but at least these Bible-bashers, who probably generate more amusement, mockery, pity and indifference than annoyance, irritation and anger, are not violent, except verbally, which can admittedly also be rather destructive where the vulnerable are concerned.

Unlike Mr Smith, I should rather encounter them in Cornmarket than standing in my doorway, and watch them safely making spectacles of themselves, sooner than leaving me wondering whether they are manufacturing bombs in some dingy bedsit.

DAVID DIMENT, Riverside Court, Oxford