Cast the first stone, Letters 12 April

The Bay of Plenty Times welcomes letters and comments from readers. Here you can read the letters we have published in your newspaper today.

Cigarettes draw the robbers to dairies

Historically, when the Bay of Plenty Times reports on the latest dairy robbery, nine times out of 10 it mentions not only money, but cigarettes being taken.

Not once in this article (News, April 2) is that fact mentioned.

I ask the following questions: Why are other businesses not robbed at knifepoint? They have money in the till also!

Could it be because they don't stock cigarettes?

Why are cigarettes so expensive that some must resort to armed robbery?

Because the Government insists they must save you from yourself.

Who gives government their permission to interfere in your individual rights? That's right, you do!

In their effort to save the lives of smokers, (who choose what they put in their mouth) they directly place the lives of innocent shop owners at risk.

They are saying that shop owners' lives are not as important as those of smokers.

Perhaps dairy owners concerned for their lives could choose not to stock cigarettes, and maybe the number of robberies would reduce.

When the Government starts putting up the price of chocolate (as they undoubtedly will) to save us from getting fat, you can expect the same scenario to be enacted.

Dairies held up by sugar-crazed pre-schoolers or grandmothers making their getaways on mobility scooters because they cannot afford to purchase a chocolate bar.

Graham Clark, Lower Kaimai

Forecasters miss

Is the taxpayer paying the weather people to predict our weather?

If we are, they should all be fired.

We have had the best weather all summer for the past two weeks and yet according to those who predict the weather we were supposed to have had the worst weather, torrential rain, very windy.

What a great weekend for the Jazz Festival.

Wendy Galloway, Omokoroa

Easter debate

Garth George amused me greatly by quoting Herbert Spencer, a man who rejected theology as the "impiety of the pious".

Just the sort of backward judgmental bigots he so rightly highlights in his "Opinion" column. Spencer, he may know, was a fierce rationalist who was also a great advocate of evolution and science.

Anyone coming from more secular regions of the globe cannot fail to be disheartened to see the overtly religious symbols and billboards that litter this beautiful land. Just as in the Southern States of the US this is surely a sign of some deep-seated insecurity about people's place in a relatively new land.

To speak of atheist "organisations" working against Easter is laughable.

What he really means is individuals who have no time for myths and falsehoods. The burden of proof, after all, is with the believer.

Just like Mr George, this Easter I would also like to quote an enlightened atheist, Douglas Adams:

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

David Griffiths, Papamoa

Naked truth

Why can't people learn to mind their own business, seems we've got every sticky beak poking their nose into other people's business once again.

What a furore over an 8-year-old on the beach without a top. For heavens sake she was 8 not 18 and even if she was it's no one else's concern.

What a pack of self-righteous hypocrites.

Even if she'd been completely naked it's no one else's concern.

Hope the mother defies everybody and does so next time.

As for her being traumatised by seeing naked men, what a lot of hogwash. She could belong to a home where her family (father, brothers) go around naked or the family belong to a nudest club where the child has been brought up with nudity for all we know. As for it being child abuse what utter [rubbish].

Anyway, it would seem she's a well-adjusted child who won't need 12 months' trauma counselling like so many of the nosy parkers who, horror of horrors, might see a naked man. She is obviously well adjusted and has good sensible parents.

What about prime-time TV and all the naked men and woman on that hospital programme a few weeks back, as she used to say "we're all the same anyway". Never saw any complaints about that, and millions would have seen that, kids and all. I know my grandkids did, not just half a dozen on the beach. About time people learned to butt out and keep their nose in their own pork chop.

I'll bet most of the complainers do far worse things themselves: Let him that is without sin cast the first stone - would be good for us all to remember.

Ian Horowe, Te Puke