Saturday, November 02, 2002
With all due respect to the Boy Scouts of America, sometimes you guys are a bunch of freakin' morons.
If the Scouts want to ban gays or people with green eyes, that's their business. They are a private organization and can make up whatever rules they want. But this kid was given an ultimatum: either declare a belief in a deity, or get kicked out of Scouts. He's currently an atheist. They don't care what he believes in, he just has to believe something. Oh, and he has one week to come up with a belief in a Supreme Being.
The problem is that some religions are mutually exclusive: the Catholics and the Buddhists can't both be right. Commandment Numero Uno has that little "there are no other gods but me" clause which pretty much dismisses just about every other religion out there. So the scouts are basically mandating that at least some of their members believe something that must be false. If you have a good Catholic scout and a good Buddhist scout, at least one of them MUST be living a lie.
If the scouts want to have a religion clause, then they should at least have the guts to pick a specific god and run with it. But forcing kids to declare a belief in something that won't be true for many of them is just plain stupid.
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If the Scouts want to ban gays or people with green eyes, that's their business. They are a private organization and can make up whatever rules they want. But this kid was given an ultimatum: either declare a belief in a deity, or get kicked out of Scouts. He's currently an atheist. They don't care what he believes in, he just has to believe something. Oh, and he has one week to come up with a belief in a Supreme Being.
The problem is that some religions are mutually exclusive: the Catholics and the Buddhists can't both be right. Commandment Numero Uno has that little "there are no other gods but me" clause which pretty much dismisses just about every other religion out there. So the scouts are basically mandating that at least some of their members believe something that must be false. If you have a good Catholic scout and a good Buddhist scout, at least one of them MUST be living a lie.
If the scouts want to have a religion clause, then they should at least have the guts to pick a specific god and run with it. But forcing kids to declare a belief in something that won't be true for many of them is just plain stupid.
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