It's messy
Submitted by Forgiven on 2002-10-29 18:43:49, Tuesday
In reply to An interesting situation submitted by Altima on 2002-10-29 13:55:50, Tuesday
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clearly the organisation has the right to impose its standards on the people who are its members - and if they don't conform, they can't be members. A secondary question then is whether this is a rational stance to take; is belief in a 'supreme being' a requisite to being a good scout? Given the totally vacuous content of the belief required (you could be a Satanist from reading the story, committed to any sort of evil) it's hard to justify. One suspects that the requirement derives from the attempt by people to cling onto the label religious (and in the past Christian) although they have long lost any real content to that term; this is the same thing - other than salary - that keeps people who don't believe in the objective reality of God or the resurrection of Jesus in the ranks of the clergy in some denominations. As such I would much prefer the scouts to be honest and abandon the 'forms of religion' that don't even pretend to any power (cf 2 Tim 3 v 5), than give a false impression that kids there are in a 'Christian' environment. The other root of course comes from the individualist nature of modern society, that is unwilling to conform to collective standard, but rather to judge them for themselves. Whilst at its best such an attitude is what Jesus shows in his reinterpretation of the laws of the Sabbath, when the appeal is to the standards of modern society as the judge, it is probably a less wise approach. |
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