Not forcing beliefs on others

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Re: Religious protection equal, February 29 letter.

I would suggest that you are right. Mr Best’s argument is not that something is being erected, but that it is Buddhists — a group of people who are not, through colonialistic motives, forcing a religion or belief system on to a native population who already have their own well established one. Whereas the missionaries, catholic or otherwise, did just that; just as they had done for centuries before, and continue to. If they actually did some study then they would recognise a lot of Buddhist ethos within the teachings of a simple carpenter from Nazareth who allegedly lived in the first century CE, died and was deified.

Matthew Roderick