Seriously? Don't look now, "Scouting America," but the single fastest growing demographic in the United States, as it comes to religion or spirituality, are the NONES. That's right, those of us who have no religious affiliation or flat out DO NOT BELIEVE. Yet Scouting America doesn't just insist on inserting an insubstantial deity, but requiring reverence to said deity. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I have a serious question. We have a cartoon that shows the mom instructing the boy to use a cross to hit the bullyβs. But look at the mother. She is big breasted with cleavage. SEXY. OK, not a question but an observation. Iβm assuming the artist was male.
Males can be thinkers, have erudition, sagacity and many great qualities and become atheists, not worship any god. Wrong. It seems men just canβt stop worshipping at the altar of the female breast.
Letβs stop this hypocrisy about being atheists for these menβand some womenβand allow them to build their temples to InannaβIshtar if you prefer the Akkadian variationβAphrodite, Isis or Kali.
I guess I do have a question. What is the true nature of boys and girlsβwith variance along a distributionβnot corrupted by the damned Abrahamic religions?
Scouts is a weird organization. Each troop is sponsored by another organizations. I was in one that was sponsored by a Rotary club, which means that it was filled with pyros whose parents couldn't find a babysitter. There was some religion, but for the most part no one gave a damn. Others were sponsored by churches. Those were usually filled with religious assholes. On a larger level, the Mormon church started to sponsor so many troops that the BSA kind of has kowtow to them.
But it did teach me how to make the perfect item for food fights. Build an incredible hot fire, and make pancakes. You want the fire to be hot enough that if you try to butter the pan, the butter instantly starts on fire. If the fire is hot enough, it will complete char the outside and the inside will be raw dough. They will be hard enough that you can pick these up and throw them. And yet on impact, they will explode it raw sticky dough.
Did you know that was based on one asshole (the private Investigator) telling the media that he thought it was because of D & D. He left out all the stresful mental anguish the poor kid was going through.
"Over the next few weeks, Dearβs investigation took more turns than the tunnels. He received anonymous calls that promised to reveal Egbertβs location if Dear would leave Michigan. He complied. Information led him to a friend of Egbertβs who had allowed the younger man to stay at his place. Egbert had then moved to other locations, then on to New Orleans. Eventually, Egbert called Dear himself, and the investigator went to retrieve him and hand him into his uncleβs custody on September 13. It turned out that Egbert did indeed attempt suicide in the tunnels with sleeping pills on August 15; however, he woke up and made his way to the older manβs home. While there, media attention exploded. The older man, afraid of the attention and the implications if the exact details of his relationship with Egbert went public, helped Egbert hide elsewhere in Michigan, and then helped arrange transportation for him to New Orleans. Egbert made a second unsuccessful attempt on his own life, and then worked in an oil field until the man urged him to contact Dear. Upon being interviewed by Dear, Egbert admitted that academic and parental pressure, combined with his drug use, fed into his suicide attempts. Gaming played no part in it.
"By that point, the genie was out of the bottle. Attention surrounding the case, even after Egbert was found, was fixated on the D&D angle. Dear and his associates kept details of Egbertβs drug use and sexuality out of the news, partially in deference to the family, and partially because Egbert himself didnβt want his younger brother, Doug, to be bullied over the facts. Absent that information, the gaming angle continued to be pushed in news and talk programs."
I'll never forgive the prick, because my mother got all upset when she found out I was a regular gamer. I never could explain how, if anything, it was a positive thing in making you think outside the box.
Did anyone ever figure out hiow to dispatch those damn gelatinous cubes? That was the first character I lost!
I can't say off the top of my head how to dispatch a gelatinous cube. However, I have backed a couple of slime-related Kickstarters, so I'll have a read of them.
These panics happen periodically. There was a lot of crap going on through the 80s and 90s - blaming movies, video games, D&D, nurseries, music. It also gave us the one Tom Hanks movie I didn't like.
I can't see that it's really anywhere in the rules, but I remember one DM deciding that the Gelatinous Cube was, in fact, quite flammable. The explosion that resulted is the only reason I remember the incident, and I would guess in this particular case the DM suddenly realized he'd thrown entirely too much bad guy at the party. Obviously, I really don't recommend fire for dealing with them.
I mean, only if you earned a little piece of paper (wallet sized!) that said you were responsible with knifes. No one ever lied on the test, because we were reverent. If you gave that to an atheist he'd just stab someone, you know.
Only sort of relevant. I'm glad that the Boy Scouts made the changes they made a decade ago, but it still didn't do anything about the sexual abuse problem.
I was a district executive for the Boy Scouts more than 50 years ago. I lasted a month in the job, and then realized that a paramilitary organization was really not for me. This was the early 70s, and I was a shorthaired hippie. But a bigger issue was how intent they were to try to keep gay men out of the scouts and out of any position working for them. I realize that it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that I was gay, because I was making no effort to hide it. Although I lived in a large city, that large city was very much like a small town, which is one of the reasons why I eventually left it.
I was reading the manual, and their concerns about sexual abuse of the boys was limited to keeping gay people out. They preferred Scott masters to be heterosexually married as a way of demonstrating the heterosexual cred. But the problem was, although we didn't know it at the time because it wasn't publicized, that the sexual abuse was going on and the people who committed it were people that were known to the scouts, themselves, families, churches and communities, and especially, their wives...
As Thoroughly heterosexual.
The other problem is this. I began to question my religion when I was 12 years old. This is a story I've told before so I won't repeat it now. But if you asked me, somewhere between the age of 12 and 18, if I believed in God, I probably would have said yes, even though I was pretty sure I didn't. Not too many young people can have the kind of self-assurance that would allow them to make such a statement to adults. I pretty much stopped at my bar mitzvah. In fact, other than going to the bar mitzvahs of a few of my friends, I didn't enter a synagogue again for years.
So, in my opinion, this insistence that Boy Scout show reverence for God is simply an insistence that they be hypocritical.
My brush with religion started at 12, ended when I was 19, and I clung to trying to believe for another 15 years. It piled self-loathing on top of crushing teenage angst that took a long time to overcome, but I've never entirely escaped the stank. I did join the BSA briefly, but religion didn't seem a big part of it, at least from my teen perspective. Gay exclusion also didn't seem to feature at all, probably since anti-gay sentiment was just normal.
When I was 18, I almost became a Christian after five or six years of being, for all intents and purposes, an atheist. I wrote a paper for my philosophy class about wanting to become a Christian and what it seemed to be all about for me. I showed it to my dad, whose intelligence I very much trusted. He said to me, "you don't believe a word of this, do you?" I realized that he was right. I didn't believe a word of it, but I very much wanted to
It was too late to rewrite the paper, so I turned it in anyway and got an a on it, and an A in the course as well. But that was pretty much it, except for some very slight and tentative brushes with Buddhism in my 20s. As much as I liked a lot of what Buddhism had to say, there was a lot of stuff that I simply could not believe.
Thanks for sharing. We have had similar paths. Before 12, I just believed, because you just did. At 12 I became a christian, tried hard and failed. Blamed myself, hated myself, but still tried. I absorbed as much information I could to be better, but felt nothing. I even faked falling over after "receiving the holy spirit" when touched on the forehead. (Almost everyone else had when I sneaked a peak to make sure I hadn't missed my cue.) Looking back, I can see that it was more of a social performance, even as I believed it unquestioningly.
I eventually left after getting married, my (now ex-) wife was a non-believer. For years I cling to belief, but never firmly held it. I become somewhat agnostic. Spent some time studying various religions, thinking they all must have some piece of the puzzle. Then I stopped looking.
When I became a skeptic and learned critical thinking, all belief just evaporated. Later I became a humanist. It had everything religion claimed to be and was more aligned with my worldviews.
I realized when I was in my 20s that I wanted to believe in something. But none of it was satisfactory to me, and eventually, I realized as you did: humanism was the way to go. Believe in people, believe in goodness, try to make the world a better place. That was all that was necessary.
My brother did a bit in BSA. He never talked about it much. Old man pushed me into Civil Air Patrol. It was nothing but an evening of learning to march. It had ass much to do with aviation as a foxhole.
Ha! I was a member of CAP my sophomore and junior years in high school. I even got invited to a glider encampment where I learned to fly airplanes that didn't have engines! UNFORGETTABLE!!!
Our friends' children are both in the Civil Air Patrol. (If I got it right. At least in the UK.) Their daughter was able to pilot an airplane as part of her training.
That was extremely brave of you, to pretty much out yourself, I remember how awful everyone was in their self-righteous bullshit about people being even a tinge gay. It is probably why I never thought of myself in the "B" part of LGBT... in spite of the fact I absolutely was. And most of my friends of the feminine persuasion were as well. Those long, cold winters in Maine, with not much to do but experiment with your sexuality, I guess.
I'm not sure if you mean about adding myself as gay, which I didn't do when I was working briefly for the Boy Scouts, or being atheist as a teenager, which I never really had to deal with because no one ever asked me.
Also of note, there are a great deal of more conservative thinkers making noise about the recent changes, starting with the acceptance of LGBQ and T scouts and scouters. Whenever we are in public with the girl's troop, folks are daft enough to express their distaste in allowing girls to participate. You see it on the local BSA facebook pages, and on news article comment sections. This change is ruffling more than a few feathers.
The history of the Boy Scouts in the USA is very different from what it is in Europe and other countries. The USA is the more intolerant branch, and from what my hubs tells me that the founder, while we see him as kind of racist, he was pretty progressive and tolerant for his time, wanted girls to have the same type of group, his wife created the Girl Guides to be parallel to the Boy Scouts and he supported it. A lot of folks do not understand that the segregation (gender, race, and even possibly LGBTQ status) had more to do with the culture of the time rather than the ideals of the group, so they complain that Baden-Powell would be unhappy with the current state of the program. Whether he would like it or not is irrelevant, he's dead, and the organization needs to do what it needs to do to continue. Hopefully, soon they will drop the god claptrap and truly be inclusive. It might even help them avoid the scandals and protect the children better.
So once again, the most stubbornly unyielding bigotry is shown to be anti-atheist bigotry. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and inter-religious bigotry have all been (at least on paper) expunged from the Scouts' policies, but rational, non-superstitious people are still not welcome.
I'm so DONE with the administrators of the Boy Scouts. After being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century over including LGBTQ people and girls, even if they were to finally include atheists, I'd still tell them to go find some tweezers and fuck themselves. It's been too little and too late for too long.
Yeah, my family doesn't discuss our atheism at scouts. Whenever there's a scoutmaster review for rank advancement, my kids have a pat answer for the questions about reverence/duty to god questions. One of our troops is sponsored by the American Legion in town, so not an overt religious organization, and the other is sponsored by a church. The church has one Sunday a year where they kind of honor the scouts, but more it is an expectation the troops (boys and girls are separate troops but both share the sponsor and adult committee) not only attend services, but volunteer as greeters and other things. The latest one was not well attended by the girl's troop (possibly the boy's troop either) and there was some stramash over it, just church leadership as well as scout leadership trying to push for more attendance. But the church services actually interfere in some of the scouting events, campouts have to wait to return home until service on Sunday is over so they can get into the storage garage and park the bus.
However, we are atheists in scouting and my hubs, more an apatheist, is a well respected, very involved scoutmaster and leader within the council. But, like I said, we do not discuss our religious views.
I've done several Board of Reviews for scouts and I've never brought up religion (we're given a list of suggested questions for various ranks as a guide, there's always a few faith related questions), I usually ask about how scouting can tie into other things, like academics, jobs, etc. I got both catholic religious awards in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, but never brought up the notion as a leader. Our troop actually had one kid get his religious award, one of the scout masters said it was the first one in over a dozen years. Nobody even knew how to pronounce it (Ad Altare Dei)
We have kids that are super excited to be the chaplain aide and work on religious specific tasks, awards, and badges, and we have kids that don't care. We celebrate everyone's accomplishments.
Some leaders in our troops are religious and ask those questions, and some are blase about it. Our kids have answers to satisfy without being cagey or lying. My eldest had no issues, and my daughter hasn't as of yet, but I don't expect her to. If she's passed over because of some religious kook, the hubs will correct the situation.
I'm wishing I'd bought more boxes of Caramel Delights and fewer thin mints. I'll know better when my niece starts selling next year and I go to "her" website and order boxes.
Aldi and Walmart sell cookies just as good as Tagalongs. For some strange reason the packages look a lot alike. π€ The Walmart ones have more chocolate on top. Yes, I dissected them. πͺπ¬
These days, even Keebler is getting in on the act. Their Coconut Dreams are pretty much the GS Samoa cookie. Why yes, I have a severe weakness for them, why do you ask?
Now they include girls and Gay people can be leaders but Aetheists can't join. Anybody or any organization that still excludes anybody for whatever reason deserves to go out and stay out of business. The Boy Scouts? Please. No. And don't forget both boys and girls in both scout troops were getting sexually assaulted too. Nope
Still, I find it astonishing that they can at least attempt to deal with the LGBTQ+ community, but NOT with non-believers. Boil it down, they still got the god-glasses on.
I suspect it's mostly a money thing. If Mormon conservatives weren't such a big part of their bankroll, changing the oath or permitting 'alternate' wording would be a no-brainer.
That is the Mormon influence. Funny, the excommunicated Mormons I met while living in a nudist place in California, were some of the nicest people I have ever met.
I was a girl scout. Forced into that by my folks. Nothing bad happened to me. Still excludes people though. Would not make my children if I had any to join scouting.
Girl scouts is a different organization and specifically allows "all girls". No religious test. It is confusing, seems two branches from the same tree but they are separate trees.
Thank you for clarifying that. I thought Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were basically the same organization but "separate but equal." Boy Scouts never had to sell cookies door-to-door like I did centuries ago.
When I moved to the UK, my neighbor was a Scout Master and invited me to come along. I was pleasantly surprised to see boys and girls there. There are also the Girl Guides (Rainbows, Brownies, Girl Guides) for girls only. Our daughter went until all of her friends left and she lost interest. We always encouraged things, never forced her, but required her to fulfill any commitments before quitting.
The article says the Girl Scouts didnβt have the problems the Boy Scouts did. For some reason it brings up in my consciousness the saying βgirls grow into women as boys grow into bigger boys.β
Ok, sorry. Iβll stop. I need to find a different site to discuss these thoughts because this site about the problems with believing in a god. Hmmmmm. βοΈβοΈβοΈ
π―"And by their fruit you shall know them." I remember someone on a forum using that, after the "grab 'em by the" lady bits tape, of the Bronzed Baboon, surfaced, to which some old MAGA lady replies"His kids are okay , so I'll vote for him" Talk about no reading comprehension...
Also, talk about the fallacious belief that his kids are OK. We seem to live in a boiling stew pot of humanity seasoned with poor comprehension, false assumptions, ignorance often overwhelming the more delicate seasonings of kindness and compassion.
It reminds me of the online Maga woman, who said she had never seen any racism, so therefore it didn't exist. I gt her to admit she lived in an all white town, that she had never left, so.. I pointed out perhaps she wasn't equipped to judge.
Update: I have a liver Fibroscan scheduled in an hour, then back to the specialist to analyse the results after.
In the meantime, he says the initial readings suggests my jaundice numbers are genetic and βindirectβ. He didnβt say it is benign, but he doesnβt seem alarmed or worried about it.
Yeah, but I feel more optimistic about our healthcare system here. For one, itβs not wildly out of control like in the US. Still pricey, but a single nightβs stay isnβt a six-figure minimum.
I know what you mean. If I wasn't so damn tired from the lack of sleep before my probe, it would have occurred to me to ask the anesthesiologist if he accepted my insurance. There have been several article in the TBT about how people have surgeries thinking that their insurance fully covers them. Only to discover after the fact that the anesthesiologist doesn't accept their insurance. And then they are expected to pay the full amount for their services out of pocket.
Perhaps it's me and I just don't get it, but I've noticed a few times lately that there seems to be a push for some very traditional groups to rebrand to seem more liberal, and then be the very same group they were before the rebrand. BSA falls squarely into that, and as things appear to be shaping up, they're not doing anything of true significance to welcome anyone they didn't allow before. This rebrand, then, appears to be little more than an attempt at using a name change to sweep previous problems under an increasingly lumpy rug.
Changing the name of the organization does not help when said organization isn't willing to do some cleaning and take out the garbage. Young parents these days, so far as I can tell, are looking for groups and organizations for their whole family to be part of that aren't teaching the wrong lessons to their kids. These exclusionary tactics and practices the BSA is conforming to are exactly what they object to, and rightly so. Parents have more than just the right to look for something better, they have the πππππππ‘πππ to find something that will teach better life lessons to their kids.
Why would I even want to be part of a club who wouldnβt have me as a member? With all the god botherers whoβve been nailed as sexual predators, maybe try something new.
The thing is, if you're young enough to be a boy scout, there's a promise of great adventure awaiting you, and the anti-atheist thing seems kinda irrelevant. My nephew grew greatly, as a result of his boy scout adventures, as did his dad, who was a troop leader. Down in the trenches, coaxing an unruly bunch of boys on some adventure, those must-be-a-theist words are irrelevant. Did Joey bring his asthma inhaler? Does Mike really have the food managed? Did everyone actually bring a sleeping bag? And so on.
Not that I disagree with you, but it is the day-to-day experiences that keep organizations like this afloat. We, who are not involved with scouting, can sit back and observe the ridiculousness of the organization's stance. But a whole lot of the folks actually involved might not care much. This is what gives them traction, even with all the top-level foolishness.
The best replacement for the BSA is Navigators USA. They are national. They are secular. They include girls, boys and their parents. We have a large Navigators USA group called the Secular Scouts, at the Secular Hub in Denver. Hope to see you at the Hub again.
"ππ πππ ππ πππππππ§ππ‘πππ πππ πππ. πΌπ‘'π π‘πππ ππ’π ππππ πππππππ‘π π‘βππ‘..."
Seriously? Don't look now, "Scouting America," but the single fastest growing demographic in the United States, as it comes to religion or spirituality, are the NONES. That's right, those of us who have no religious affiliation or flat out DO NOT BELIEVE. Yet Scouting America doesn't just insist on inserting an insubstantial deity, but requiring reverence to said deity. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
What a load of crap.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/267623b3013516b1dbd7dc889c23e684ec9f82e01ce98f3f5483c08bb9b0df41.png
I have a serious question. We have a cartoon that shows the mom instructing the boy to use a cross to hit the bullyβs. But look at the mother. She is big breasted with cleavage. SEXY. OK, not a question but an observation. Iβm assuming the artist was male.
Males can be thinkers, have erudition, sagacity and many great qualities and become atheists, not worship any god. Wrong. It seems men just canβt stop worshipping at the altar of the female breast.
Letβs stop this hypocrisy about being atheists for these menβand some womenβand allow them to build their temples to InannaβIshtar if you prefer the Akkadian variationβAphrodite, Isis or Kali.
I guess I do have a question. What is the true nature of boys and girlsβwith variance along a distributionβnot corrupted by the damned Abrahamic religions?
Maybe straight guys. Personally, I find them a little repulsive. Give me rock hard pecs over bags of fatty tissue any day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkJehlr1tEw&ab_channel=CALObaddie
Me thinks you complaineth too much.
Does he obsess about the breast?
Me thinketh 'tis so.
Scouts is a weird organization. Each troop is sponsored by another organizations. I was in one that was sponsored by a Rotary club, which means that it was filled with pyros whose parents couldn't find a babysitter. There was some religion, but for the most part no one gave a damn. Others were sponsored by churches. Those were usually filled with religious assholes. On a larger level, the Mormon church started to sponsor so many troops that the BSA kind of has kowtow to them.
But it did teach me how to make the perfect item for food fights. Build an incredible hot fire, and make pancakes. You want the fire to be hot enough that if you try to butter the pan, the butter instantly starts on fire. If the fire is hot enough, it will complete char the outside and the inside will be raw dough. They will be hard enough that you can pick these up and throw them. And yet on impact, they will explode it raw sticky dough.
I can tie a knot with the best of them.
Eta: I was also in the navy so I got double knot training.
My intro to Dungeons & Dragons was with the BSA. That was just before the Satanic Panic kicked off and D&D was declared evil.
Did you know that was based on one asshole (the private Investigator) telling the media that he thought it was because of D & D. He left out all the stresful mental anguish the poor kid was going through.
"Over the next few weeks, Dearβs investigation took more turns than the tunnels. He received anonymous calls that promised to reveal Egbertβs location if Dear would leave Michigan. He complied. Information led him to a friend of Egbertβs who had allowed the younger man to stay at his place. Egbert had then moved to other locations, then on to New Orleans. Eventually, Egbert called Dear himself, and the investigator went to retrieve him and hand him into his uncleβs custody on September 13. It turned out that Egbert did indeed attempt suicide in the tunnels with sleeping pills on August 15; however, he woke up and made his way to the older manβs home. While there, media attention exploded. The older man, afraid of the attention and the implications if the exact details of his relationship with Egbert went public, helped Egbert hide elsewhere in Michigan, and then helped arrange transportation for him to New Orleans. Egbert made a second unsuccessful attempt on his own life, and then worked in an oil field until the man urged him to contact Dear. Upon being interviewed by Dear, Egbert admitted that academic and parental pressure, combined with his drug use, fed into his suicide attempts. Gaming played no part in it.
"By that point, the genie was out of the bottle. Attention surrounding the case, even after Egbert was found, was fixated on the D&D angle. Dear and his associates kept details of Egbertβs drug use and sexuality out of the news, partially in deference to the family, and partially because Egbert himself didnβt want his younger brother, Doug, to be bullied over the facts. Absent that information, the gaming angle continued to be pushed in news and talk programs."
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/09/disappearances-dragons-the-james-dallas-egbert-iii-story/
I'll never forgive the prick, because my mother got all upset when she found out I was a regular gamer. I never could explain how, if anything, it was a positive thing in making you think outside the box.
Did anyone ever figure out hiow to dispatch those damn gelatinous cubes? That was the first character I lost!
I can't say off the top of my head how to dispatch a gelatinous cube. However, I have backed a couple of slime-related Kickstarters, so I'll have a read of them.
These panics happen periodically. There was a lot of crap going on through the 80s and 90s - blaming movies, video games, D&D, nurseries, music. It also gave us the one Tom Hanks movie I didn't like.
I can't see that it's really anywhere in the rules, but I remember one DM deciding that the Gelatinous Cube was, in fact, quite flammable. The explosion that resulted is the only reason I remember the incident, and I would guess in this particular case the DM suddenly realized he'd thrown entirely too much bad guy at the party. Obviously, I really don't recommend fire for dealing with them.
This is yet another reason to love this forum! I was under the impression that there really wasn't an option other than "Oh shit, run away!"
I totally remember those days.... Lol
The lesson I learned from Boy scouts, was never trust a boy scout. We were evil little shits.
And we gave you knives?!?
I mean, only if you earned a little piece of paper (wallet sized!) that said you were responsible with knifes. No one ever lied on the test, because we were reverent. If you gave that to an atheist he'd just stab someone, you know.
Depending on the knife, slicing is better than stabbing.
I still know where my little piece of paper is.
Only sort of relevant. I'm glad that the Boy Scouts made the changes they made a decade ago, but it still didn't do anything about the sexual abuse problem.
I was a district executive for the Boy Scouts more than 50 years ago. I lasted a month in the job, and then realized that a paramilitary organization was really not for me. This was the early 70s, and I was a shorthaired hippie. But a bigger issue was how intent they were to try to keep gay men out of the scouts and out of any position working for them. I realize that it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that I was gay, because I was making no effort to hide it. Although I lived in a large city, that large city was very much like a small town, which is one of the reasons why I eventually left it.
I was reading the manual, and their concerns about sexual abuse of the boys was limited to keeping gay people out. They preferred Scott masters to be heterosexually married as a way of demonstrating the heterosexual cred. But the problem was, although we didn't know it at the time because it wasn't publicized, that the sexual abuse was going on and the people who committed it were people that were known to the scouts, themselves, families, churches and communities, and especially, their wives...
As Thoroughly heterosexual.
The other problem is this. I began to question my religion when I was 12 years old. This is a story I've told before so I won't repeat it now. But if you asked me, somewhere between the age of 12 and 18, if I believed in God, I probably would have said yes, even though I was pretty sure I didn't. Not too many young people can have the kind of self-assurance that would allow them to make such a statement to adults. I pretty much stopped at my bar mitzvah. In fact, other than going to the bar mitzvahs of a few of my friends, I didn't enter a synagogue again for years.
So, in my opinion, this insistence that Boy Scout show reverence for God is simply an insistence that they be hypocritical.
My brush with religion started at 12, ended when I was 19, and I clung to trying to believe for another 15 years. It piled self-loathing on top of crushing teenage angst that took a long time to overcome, but I've never entirely escaped the stank. I did join the BSA briefly, but religion didn't seem a big part of it, at least from my teen perspective. Gay exclusion also didn't seem to feature at all, probably since anti-gay sentiment was just normal.
This is also a story I've told before.
When I was 18, I almost became a Christian after five or six years of being, for all intents and purposes, an atheist. I wrote a paper for my philosophy class about wanting to become a Christian and what it seemed to be all about for me. I showed it to my dad, whose intelligence I very much trusted. He said to me, "you don't believe a word of this, do you?" I realized that he was right. I didn't believe a word of it, but I very much wanted to
It was too late to rewrite the paper, so I turned it in anyway and got an a on it, and an A in the course as well. But that was pretty much it, except for some very slight and tentative brushes with Buddhism in my 20s. As much as I liked a lot of what Buddhism had to say, there was a lot of stuff that I simply could not believe.
Thanks for sharing. We have had similar paths. Before 12, I just believed, because you just did. At 12 I became a christian, tried hard and failed. Blamed myself, hated myself, but still tried. I absorbed as much information I could to be better, but felt nothing. I even faked falling over after "receiving the holy spirit" when touched on the forehead. (Almost everyone else had when I sneaked a peak to make sure I hadn't missed my cue.) Looking back, I can see that it was more of a social performance, even as I believed it unquestioningly.
I eventually left after getting married, my (now ex-) wife was a non-believer. For years I cling to belief, but never firmly held it. I become somewhat agnostic. Spent some time studying various religions, thinking they all must have some piece of the puzzle. Then I stopped looking.
When I became a skeptic and learned critical thinking, all belief just evaporated. Later I became a humanist. It had everything religion claimed to be and was more aligned with my worldviews.
You are welcome.
I realized when I was in my 20s that I wanted to believe in something. But none of it was satisfactory to me, and eventually, I realized as you did: humanism was the way to go. Believe in people, believe in goodness, try to make the world a better place. That was all that was necessary.
https://youtu.be/6oVneRC8ZNo
Absolutely perfect.
And the perfect person to deliver it.
My brother did a bit in BSA. He never talked about it much. Old man pushed me into Civil Air Patrol. It was nothing but an evening of learning to march. It had ass much to do with aviation as a foxhole.
A few yers ago my niece's son got into Civil Air Patrol. They actually did aviation related things.
Ha! I was a member of CAP my sophomore and junior years in high school. I even got invited to a glider encampment where I learned to fly airplanes that didn't have engines! UNFORGETTABLE!!!
Our friends' children are both in the Civil Air Patrol. (If I got it right. At least in the UK.) Their daughter was able to pilot an airplane as part of her training.
That was extremely brave of you, to pretty much out yourself, I remember how awful everyone was in their self-righteous bullshit about people being even a tinge gay. It is probably why I never thought of myself in the "B" part of LGBT... in spite of the fact I absolutely was. And most of my friends of the feminine persuasion were as well. Those long, cold winters in Maine, with not much to do but experiment with your sexuality, I guess.
I'm not sure if you mean about adding myself as gay, which I didn't do when I was working briefly for the Boy Scouts, or being atheist as a teenager, which I never really had to deal with because no one ever asked me.
You said you made no real effort to hide being gay in the early 70's, that was brave as hell.
Thanks, but it was the glory days of Gay liberation. I moved to San Francisco in 1975 and never looked back.
Also of note, there are a great deal of more conservative thinkers making noise about the recent changes, starting with the acceptance of LGBQ and T scouts and scouters. Whenever we are in public with the girl's troop, folks are daft enough to express their distaste in allowing girls to participate. You see it on the local BSA facebook pages, and on news article comment sections. This change is ruffling more than a few feathers.
The history of the Boy Scouts in the USA is very different from what it is in Europe and other countries. The USA is the more intolerant branch, and from what my hubs tells me that the founder, while we see him as kind of racist, he was pretty progressive and tolerant for his time, wanted girls to have the same type of group, his wife created the Girl Guides to be parallel to the Boy Scouts and he supported it. A lot of folks do not understand that the segregation (gender, race, and even possibly LGBTQ status) had more to do with the culture of the time rather than the ideals of the group, so they complain that Baden-Powell would be unhappy with the current state of the program. Whether he would like it or not is irrelevant, he's dead, and the organization needs to do what it needs to do to continue. Hopefully, soon they will drop the god claptrap and truly be inclusive. It might even help them avoid the scandals and protect the children better.
So once again, the most stubbornly unyielding bigotry is shown to be anti-atheist bigotry. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and inter-religious bigotry have all been (at least on paper) expunged from the Scouts' policies, but rational, non-superstitious people are still not welcome.
I'm so DONE with the administrators of the Boy Scouts. After being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century over including LGBTQ people and girls, even if they were to finally include atheists, I'd still tell them to go find some tweezers and fuck themselves. It's been too little and too late for too long.
Given what the BSA gets up to, maybe it's a good thing the organization bans atheists. Why get their stink on us?
Yeah, my family doesn't discuss our atheism at scouts. Whenever there's a scoutmaster review for rank advancement, my kids have a pat answer for the questions about reverence/duty to god questions. One of our troops is sponsored by the American Legion in town, so not an overt religious organization, and the other is sponsored by a church. The church has one Sunday a year where they kind of honor the scouts, but more it is an expectation the troops (boys and girls are separate troops but both share the sponsor and adult committee) not only attend services, but volunteer as greeters and other things. The latest one was not well attended by the girl's troop (possibly the boy's troop either) and there was some stramash over it, just church leadership as well as scout leadership trying to push for more attendance. But the church services actually interfere in some of the scouting events, campouts have to wait to return home until service on Sunday is over so they can get into the storage garage and park the bus.
However, we are atheists in scouting and my hubs, more an apatheist, is a well respected, very involved scoutmaster and leader within the council. But, like I said, we do not discuss our religious views.
I've done several Board of Reviews for scouts and I've never brought up religion (we're given a list of suggested questions for various ranks as a guide, there's always a few faith related questions), I usually ask about how scouting can tie into other things, like academics, jobs, etc. I got both catholic religious awards in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, but never brought up the notion as a leader. Our troop actually had one kid get his religious award, one of the scout masters said it was the first one in over a dozen years. Nobody even knew how to pronounce it (Ad Altare Dei)
We have kids that are super excited to be the chaplain aide and work on religious specific tasks, awards, and badges, and we have kids that don't care. We celebrate everyone's accomplishments.
Some leaders in our troops are religious and ask those questions, and some are blase about it. Our kids have answers to satisfy without being cagey or lying. My eldest had no issues, and my daughter hasn't as of yet, but I don't expect her to. If she's passed over because of some religious kook, the hubs will correct the situation.
The secular alternative to the BSA
https://www.navigatorsusa.org/
We have a large Navigators USA group in Denver at the Secular Hub. Girls, Boys and their parents. Growing fast.
We have a number of chapters in my state. The one in my city is Chapter 146.
Most excellent! Thanks for letting us know!
I'd be intrigued to see if they're more than a good first look. Be nice if they are.
I'd imagine they'd encourage checking them out thoroughly.
That speaks volumes, all by itself.
Looks like a great organization.
I'll take the Girl Scouts any day. Yummy cookies and no religious bullshit.
The Girl Scouts know what they've got. I heard of one enterprising young lady who set up in front of a dispensary. Made a killing.
Here they like to set up in front of QFC and Fred Meyer to snag those impulse $$$. :D
VA had a table full of GS cookies free for vets at Jesse Brown Hospital. Jacked my sugar but well worth it.
Sweet! Wish my VA had something like that (maybe they did and I missed it). :)
Guess what I just got at my VA? A PACT Physician who listens to what I'm saying!
Or maybe Bags beat you to it.
Amy: My mom made it up as an alternative to the Girl Scouts. She didn't want me selling cookies on some street corner like a whore.
"She didn't want me selling MY cookies on some street corner like a whore."
FIFY.
It's amazing how significant just two little innocent letters can change an entire meaning of a sentence. π€£
Tru--
Truth or trump. Two little letters.
You can't have both
Yummy and expensive, or getting expensive. But definitely yummy.
Publix actually has a better thin mint type cookie, I discovered it recently, as in I still have one cookie left.
I'm wishing I'd bought more boxes of Caramel Delights and fewer thin mints. I'll know better when my niece starts selling next year and I go to "her" website and order boxes.
Aldi and Walmart sell cookies just as good as Tagalongs. For some strange reason the packages look a lot alike. π€ The Walmart ones have more chocolate on top. Yes, I dissected them. πͺπ¬
https://www.aldi.us/products/snacks/cookies-sweets/detail/ps/p/bentons-peanut-butter-filled-cookies/
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Fudge-Covered-Peanut-Butter-Filled-Cookies-9-5-oz/11303914?athbdg=L1600&from=/search
These days, even Keebler is getting in on the act. Their Coconut Dreams are pretty much the GS Samoa cookie. Why yes, I have a severe weakness for them, why do you ask?
https://www.keebler.com/en/sweet-treat/cookies/fudge/coconut-dreams
I believe the Samoa was renamed Caramel Delight. Cookie, Caramel, coated in toasted coconut, drizzled with chocolate.
*gasp* Someone bring me my pearls and the fainting couch! Stat! Zorglub has dissected cookies! You're a mad scientist!
Now they include girls and Gay people can be leaders but Aetheists can't join. Anybody or any organization that still excludes anybody for whatever reason deserves to go out and stay out of business. The Boy Scouts? Please. No. And don't forget both boys and girls in both scout troops were getting sexually assaulted too. Nope
Never was a Boy Scout, growing up. Looking back on it now, I think it was clearly just as well.
I know 2 former Eagle Scouts, both are adult gay men today (happily married, but not to each other).
Still, I find it astonishing that they can at least attempt to deal with the LGBTQ+ community, but NOT with non-believers. Boil it down, they still got the god-glasses on.
I suspect it's mostly a money thing. If Mormon conservatives weren't such a big part of their bankroll, changing the oath or permitting 'alternate' wording would be a no-brainer.
Once a god botherer, always a god botherer.
That is the Mormon influence. Funny, the excommunicated Mormons I met while living in a nudist place in California, were some of the nicest people I have ever met.
I was a girl scout. Forced into that by my folks. Nothing bad happened to me. Still excludes people though. Would not make my children if I had any to join scouting.
Girl scouts is a different organization and specifically allows "all girls". No religious test. It is confusing, seems two branches from the same tree but they are separate trees.
Thank you for clarifying that. I thought Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were basically the same organization but "separate but equal." Boy Scouts never had to sell cookies door-to-door like I did centuries ago.
When I moved to the UK, my neighbor was a Scout Master and invited me to come along. I was pleasantly surprised to see boys and girls there. There are also the Girl Guides (Rainbows, Brownies, Girl Guides) for girls only. Our daughter went until all of her friends left and she lost interest. We always encouraged things, never forced her, but required her to fulfill any commitments before quitting.
Me too, for a few years. I got to go to Girl Scout horse camp one summer for 2 weeks, that was a blast.
The article says the Girl Scouts didnβt have the problems the Boy Scouts did. For some reason it brings up in my consciousness the saying βgirls grow into women as boys grow into bigger boys.β
Ok, sorry. Iβll stop. I need to find a different site to discuss these thoughts because this site about the problems with believing in a god. Hmmmmm. βοΈβοΈβοΈ
I has no idea that the Scouts any Scouts were Christian. Yup. Now I know. Stupid. Take care!
And therefore we see that the seed that grew into scouts was was destined to grow into a tree with poisonous fruit.
π―"And by their fruit you shall know them." I remember someone on a forum using that, after the "grab 'em by the" lady bits tape, of the Bronzed Baboon, surfaced, to which some old MAGA lady replies"His kids are okay , so I'll vote for him" Talk about no reading comprehension...
Also, talk about the fallacious belief that his kids are OK. We seem to live in a boiling stew pot of humanity seasoned with poor comprehension, false assumptions, ignorance often overwhelming the more delicate seasonings of kindness and compassion.
It reminds me of the online Maga woman, who said she had never seen any racism, so therefore it didn't exist. I gt her to admit she lived in an all white town, that she had never left, so.. I pointed out perhaps she wasn't equipped to judge.
Yup. And priests and scout leaders have lunch and compare notes.
Sorry! It's atheist with just one a at the beginning? Thank you!
It looks distinctive with the "ae."
It does. I like it as well.
Me too. Steampunk-y. :)
So ... do you prefer Γtheist or Γ¦theist?
The first is ALT-0198 and the second is ALT-0230
Use in good health!
OT: Sitting in queue to see a gastroenterologist about my liver. Second in line and the doctor hasnβt arrived yet.
*sigh* Whereβs all the cool Star Trek miracle cures?
Too much Romulan Ale?
I donβt partake in alcohol, for which the doctor has good hopes for my liver.
Chianti hope?
Update: I have a liver Fibroscan scheduled in an hour, then back to the specialist to analyse the results after.
In the meantime, he says the initial readings suggests my jaundice numbers are genetic and βindirectβ. He didnβt say it is benign, but he doesnβt seem alarmed or worried about it.
"he doesnβt seem alarmed or worried about it." Same with my prostate. But then I thought β why should he worry, it's not him? :)
Yeah, but I feel more optimistic about our healthcare system here. For one, itβs not wildly out of control like in the US. Still pricey, but a single nightβs stay isnβt a six-figure minimum.
I know what you mean. If I wasn't so damn tired from the lack of sleep before my probe, it would have occurred to me to ask the anesthesiologist if he accepted my insurance. There have been several article in the TBT about how people have surgeries thinking that their insurance fully covers them. Only to discover after the fact that the anesthesiologist doesn't accept their insurance. And then they are expected to pay the full amount for their services out of pocket.
You're in the wrong century, dude.
While you're waiting
https://youtu.be/Ssq8wHAx4nE
Show the doctor this. :)
The best of all the ST movies from TOS.
You task me.
Or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgxzSUxxRzE
Jesus God, ignore that last. This just popped up in my feed as I was explaining to a homeopath that it's water!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZxTrnUqTM
"if that doesn't cure me nothing wIll".
Ohhhhh, myyy!
Perhaps it's me and I just don't get it, but I've noticed a few times lately that there seems to be a push for some very traditional groups to rebrand to seem more liberal, and then be the very same group they were before the rebrand. BSA falls squarely into that, and as things appear to be shaping up, they're not doing anything of true significance to welcome anyone they didn't allow before. This rebrand, then, appears to be little more than an attempt at using a name change to sweep previous problems under an increasingly lumpy rug.
Changing the name of the organization does not help when said organization isn't willing to do some cleaning and take out the garbage. Young parents these days, so far as I can tell, are looking for groups and organizations for their whole family to be part of that aren't teaching the wrong lessons to their kids. These exclusionary tactics and practices the BSA is conforming to are exactly what they object to, and rightly so. Parents have more than just the right to look for something better, they have the πππππππ‘πππ to find something that will teach better life lessons to their kids.
Why would I even want to be part of a club who wouldnβt have me as a member? With all the god botherers whoβve been nailed as sexual predators, maybe try something new.
The thing is, if you're young enough to be a boy scout, there's a promise of great adventure awaiting you, and the anti-atheist thing seems kinda irrelevant. My nephew grew greatly, as a result of his boy scout adventures, as did his dad, who was a troop leader. Down in the trenches, coaxing an unruly bunch of boys on some adventure, those must-be-a-theist words are irrelevant. Did Joey bring his asthma inhaler? Does Mike really have the food managed? Did everyone actually bring a sleeping bag? And so on.
Not that I disagree with you, but it is the day-to-day experiences that keep organizations like this afloat. We, who are not involved with scouting, can sit back and observe the ridiculousness of the organization's stance. But a whole lot of the folks actually involved might not care much. This is what gives them traction, even with all the top-level foolishness.
I get it. My Girl Scout leader was a Mormon. I had no clue until my mom told me, long after they moved away.
The best replacement for the BSA is Navigators USA. They are national. They are secular. They include girls, boys and their parents. We have a large Navigators USA group called the Secular Scouts, at the Secular Hub in Denver. Hope to see you at the Hub again.
Yup. I posted a link to Navigators USA elsewhere on the thread.