Merlyn_LeRoy

You see your problem here is that you've taken something written in The Daily mail at face value. It's also in the Telegraph and on the website of the National Secular Society, but you apparently aren't interested in doing any checking or you'd know that already. It is just that I also sense you are pointing to the GG troop as the only one acting wrong in this story.. Hey, they're disobeying the rules of a group they freely joined; if they don't like it, they can start their own group. That's what many BSA members have pushed on atheists and gays for years, but I guess that "rule" only works for rules you prefer. But there is the faction of atheist who want to enter, then kill the religious tradition of BSA, by stamping out any religious aspect.. That group I am NOT welcoming, because they will NOT be respectful of others. Just like you're not being respectful of atheists right now. Hypocrite.

Seriously though Merlyn here is where we split.. Though I would be fine with some change to include atheists, I would expect Atheists to come in respecting the beliefs of others.. Probably if this happened to BSA, then I would end up trying to appease by allowing both the old & new oaths to be done, and you can pick the one you like, and stay silent and RESPECTFUL while the other group says the one they like.. What's that got to do with this story? The leaders of this GG troop are the ones not respecting the atheist. And if you're referring to "Why don't they start their own organization instead of trying to change the one they're in?", your sarcasm meter is busted.

It appears their "love of god" means excluding people who don't believe the same as them, and also breaking the rules of the organization. Why don't they start their own organization instead of trying to change the one they're in?

The Christian leaders of a troop of Girl Guides are defying orders from their national HQ to scrap the old promise to ‘love my God’. A controversial decision was made in June to abandon allegiance to God, with the traditional pledge replaced with the words ‘be true to myself and develop my beliefs’. The new promise comes into effect from September 1. But last night it was revealed that a group of ‘rogue’ Girl Guide leaders have vowed that they will stick with the old promise and defy the line set by Girlguiding UK, the national body. The move has split the group – an atheist Girl Guide leader who recently joined has enlisted an atheist pressure group to fight on her behalf to adopt the new pledge. ... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...fy-orders.html

Uh, actually, the "Freedom from Religion" foundation works from a position of fiction. There is NO "freedom from religion" in the USA. It is freedom OF religion, a completely different and diametrically opposed concept. Neither phrase appears in the first amendment; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." The FFRF uses "freedom from religion" in reference to the no establishment clause; the government cannot impose religious rituals on citizens, you can't be required to swear an oath, to believe in a god, etc.

If someone wants to put up a memorial to something important, and it "offends" me, being tolerant means let it go and just move on, the memorial isn't something meant as important to me. There wouldn't be any complaints if this memorial was paid for with private money and put on private property. There's always a certain amount of MYOB when it comes to tolerance. It becomes my business when it involves my tax money and my government. If some group wishes to put up something I find offensive next door, and it's on private property, I don't have to contribute to it and I guess I would rather invest in curtains so I don't have to look at it. Well this particular monument isn't that. We have become a society of zero-tolerance. If I'm annoyed, I sue. That is a serious breakdown in a civil society. This isn't about a supposed lawsuit over being "offended" by something on private property. The breakdown is in your not understanding the situation. In the other thread, you implied you would not be able to create tax-exempt status for a group named NAAWP, even though you can. Do you always argue over how you imagine the world to be instead of how it actually is?

But the government isn't being tolerant of all religions in this case. Jews are represented, but not Jehovah's Witnesses, for example. On the face of it, this memorial seems to only be memorializing Jews. The other two proposed memorials didn't have this problem. Equality for all does not mean any one group gets a step up on anyone else That principle would include not creating public memorials that only include some of the people being memorialized. Here's a recent judge's injunction against a WWII memorial that only represented Christian soldiers (and one Jew, but I guess they didn't get the news that a star of david isn't really a religious symbol): http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2013/07/22/judge-blocks-christian-war-memorial/

Atheists have symbols; you may have noticed mine or ThomasJefferson's. As for a star of david not being a religious symbol, the US military for one appears to disagree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Veterans_Affairs_emblems_for_headstones_and_markers

Then it would make sense to post a general article about monuments, not an obvious attempt to denigrate atheists. It's like a white supremacist posting an article about blacks committing crimes and pretending it's just to start a discussion on law enforcement.

Well, it wasn't just Jews who were killed in the holocaust, but this memorial seems to only be about them. By the way, what does this have to do with scouting?

jblake47 writes: Let's just for example see how far I would get with the IRS applying for a tax-exempt status for a group named NAAWP. Yeah, where's the equal rights in that? If you meet the qualifications for tax-exempt status, you'd get it, and if a government official tried to deny it based on the viewpoint of your group, the ACLU would sue on your behalf, as that constitutes viewpoint discrimination which is a first amendment violation. Now, if you apply as a tax-exempt organization that performs some sort of public service, you can't refuse to perform that service based on e.g. race because the government will refuse to subsidize that, but if you want to create a racist church, have at it. When David Duke left the KKK, he started the NAAWP as a non-profit. The website is gone, but there is (or was) a non-profit NAAWP based in Florida: http://www.nonprofitlist.org/cgi-bin/id/nonprofit.cgi?nonprofit=41216 Seriously, you can't just make up crap that aligns with your paranoid persecution complex and expect other people to buy it.

If civilization after civilization collapses because of Factor X and one lone statistic anomaly succeeds because of Factor Y, why would any sane person ever want to go along with Factor X Factor X being "people who forget 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' is a fallacy." Every time too many people forget this, their civilization collapses.

Thus the basic change between then and now is the obvious persecution of Christians in modern US society, especially those areas of government oversight. i.e. military, schools, etc. Hmm, looks like you've been reading WND lies. Got any specific examples of this "persecution"?

I'm amazed you don't see that as an argument in favor of gay marriage.

I say to you, the parents of atheist children, the ACLU, NOW, Atheists United, and other liberal legal interest groups stop suing the Boy Scouts What lawsuits about membership requirements have been filed since Dale? I don't know of any. School Districts, cities, states, and other government organizations stop the law suits Any public school or school district that charters a BSA unit ought to be sued. But again, I don't know of any since the Dale decision. There was the 2005 letter from the Illinois ACLU threatening to sue if the BSA continued to charter discriminatory BSA units to public schools, but since the BSA pretty much stopped issuing charters to government entities after that, I don't know of any lawsuits. There have been a few lawsuits post-Dale over special government deals that the BSA gets, because the government shouldn't take public tax money and spend it on an organization that discriminates on the basis of religion, as that's a first amendment issue. And the law suits continue. When I say “Leave us alone†I say stop attempting to join the Boy Scouts using force via the courts. Which lawsuits? I'm serious, cite some actual recent lawsuits. I'm very up on atheist issues and I don't know of any. We have been very honest Nope, not when public schools were the #1 largest chartering partner while the BSA expected these public schools to exclude atheists. That's in violation of the constitution. Texas was the worst, with 25% of all cub scout packs chartered by public schools.

What should Atheists do? First they and their supporters should leave the Boy Scouts alone. Since atheists have first amendment rights, and since the BSA has been less than honest when excluding atheists, no.

I don't use a binary system of true/false belief. I can hold beliefs as "possibly true" or "almost certainly true" or "maybe true but from a dubious source" or "probably false" and all kinds of shaded truth values. That's why I disagree with your statement that "Belief is something that someone accepts as true even when complete knowledge is not available" because I often don't accept something as "true" but as a more complex truth value.

Belief is something that someone accepts as true even when complete knowledge is not available. Not in my book. By the way, until we have full knowledge of everything, there will always be a faith/belief system for everyone. Like I said, your definitions lead to everyone having billions of "belief systems", making the term useless.

Nice try Merlyn, never even implied Christo-centricism You imply it by the central importance of "belief", which is important in Christianity but not so much in some other religions. You emphasize it because it's important in your own religion, but that has no bearing on other religions. So if an agnostic BELIEVES we cannot know, that in itself is a belief system. I don't agree that a single belief or lack of a particular belief constitutes a "belief system"; if I don't believe in unicorns, I wouldn't call that a "belief system". Since everyone believes and doesn't believe in a huge number of assertions, does everyone have millions of belief systems? The term becomes meaningless.

Your choices are very Christo-centric. There are plenty of gods that don't care what you believe, they care about what you do. There are also gods that don't even care what you do. You're just taking an arbitrary characteristic, belief, and pretending it's pertinent for all gods when it isn't. The only part that really is a mystery to me is the fact that atheists actually do BELIEVE there is no god, and that is in fact a faith based decision. That's because you don't really know what atheists think.

Use the chartering process to control the values, and get the government back able to endorse. We do not require a religious belief for membership. But if the boy doesn't complete his religious achievements, he doesn't earn his ranks that require it. We don't discriminate, and get back into the schools. You can't get government support if members' religious views can result in inferior treatment; unless atheists and anyone who created their own religious cult last weekend can earn all ranks, that won't be good enough.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mooks

Really? That would be news to a whole bunch of Buddhist (and a bunch of people of quite a few other faiths). Though I guess you could be one of those people that don't believe Buddhism is a real religion. Boomerscout, I wouldn't categorize any of my beliefs as religious beliefs, though my assumption of, say, an absence of any afterlife could be considered a belief "about" an afterlife. I have come across a few atheists who believe in things that I would put under religious beliefs, like belief in the existence of ghosts, or reincarnation, but they're pretty rare.

Really? That would be news to a whole bunch of Buddhist (and a bunch of people of quite a few other faiths). Though I guess you could be one of those people that don't believe Buddhism is a real religion. Boomerscout, I believe lots of things. Gods are not on that list.

So "Duty to God" is in fact not making an oath to YHWH nor to any other god, unless the individual's religious duties require it. That doesn't matter. Public schools can't run private clubs that require a "duty to god". Could you please explain how this is a constitutional problem? It's a constitutional problem only if public schools become chartering organizations again.