Merlyn_LeRoy

What do you not want them to go back to? Since I haven't made such an assertion, your question doesn't really apply, although if I looked through some of the older handbooks I could probably find things I wouldn't want them to go back to. However, you still haven't clarified what your "Faith based morality" remark would mean; if the GSUSA "went back" to it, what changes would there be? For that matter, Nike hasn't said what coming back to their senses would mean, either. Don't either of you have the courage of your convictions?

What faith-based morality have they abandoned, specifically?

Nike writes: I just wish BSA could start Girl Guides America or GSUSA would come back to thier senses. What would constitute coming back to their senses?

Merlyn_LeRoy, is using Planned Parenthood to provide sex education what you would call "keeping sexual issues out of the program"? Where have the Girl Scouts done that?

Scouter760 writes: I think the GSUSA lost control due to their loose organization and unwillingness to take any stand on moral issues. I think they took a stand on moral issues by not excluding people for having "unacceptable" religious views, and by keeping sexual issues out of the program.

The ACLU threatened to sue: http://www.aclu-il.org/news/archives/bsaletter.pdf "[rechartering units] would avoid the need for further litigation in Illinois regarding direct government sponsorship of Scouting" Not only would an excluded atheist make a suitable litigant, but it probably could have been pursued like the WInkler case, which I think was brought on the behalf of Illinois/Chicago taxpayers against the Chicago school board.

Fred Goodwin writes: I wish those who curse BSA and want to sue it into submission would take a lesson from AHG and Richard Dawkins: rather than trying to bend BSA to your will, how about doing something constructive instead like creating an alternative? I wish those who had bent public schools to their will of religious discrimination had voluntarily seen that public schools can't possibly charter private clubs that exclude atheists and had dropped them, instead of requiring the ACLU to threaten to sue public schools that violated the civil rights of their own students.

Ed, it isn't name calling. You really aren't able to understand. These are ALL negative statements: "unicorns don't exist" "gods don't exist" "chairs don't exist" "coelacanths don't exist" "tigers don't exist" Understand Ed? ALL of the above are negative statements. Do you agree, and understand, that ALL of the above are negative statements? You stated that "you can't disprove a negative." This is incorrect. Three of the above five negative statements can be disproved; that means your statement is incorrect. But you can't understand this simple logic, even though it's being taught to kids attending Camp Quest.

Stating chairs don't exist is the same as stating this forum doesn't exist. We all know both do. Hence, the statement is bunk. Ed, you're an idiot. Let me repeat that. You're an idiot. My example of "chairs don't exist" was solely to refute this false statement of yours from the third message in this thread: "And you can't disprove a negative either." That statement of yours is false. It is easily shown to be false. "Chairs don't exist" is a negative. I can disprove this negative. The above steps show that your statement "And you can't disprove a negative either" is false. It is IRRELEVANT that the statement is trivial; the important part is that it is a negative, and it's possible to disprove that particular negative -- hence, your claim that "you can't disprove a negative" is shown to be incorrect. Is that what this lovely little camp is going to teach kids? How to disprove the obvious? No Ed, it's to teach reasoning. And since you can't even understand this simple concept, after multiple attempts, you're just an idiot. Seriously, Ed. If someone is trying to teach, say syllogistic logic, and they say: 1) All men are mortal 2) Socrates is a man 3) therefore, Socrates is mortal ...you don't "object" to this trivial example of logic by saying "DUH!! EVERYBODY KNOWS SOCRATES IS A MAN, DUH!!" That just misses the point entirely. That's EXACTLY what you're doing regarding your stupid objections to my chair example. Yes, it IS a trivial example. It's an example of HOW YOU CAN DISPROVE A NEGATIVE. A negative statement can usually be disproved by coming up with an example that the statement says does not exist. Which means your original boneheaded statement of "And you can't disprove a negative either" is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! But you are LITERALLY too stupid to realize this. I mean it Ed, you are about the dumbest person I've ever encountered. You can't understand the simplest concepts that have been explained time after time. You are an idiot. What is sad, Merlyn, is you can't acknowledge the existence of something you can't prove. Time to take off the blinders. Does this mean you acknowledge the existence of unicorns, Ed? My point - You can't prove God doesn't exist. You can't prove unicorns don't exist. PS: "you can't prove a negative" only applies to unbounded negatives (and "you can't prove a negative" typically implies that); you can prove some negatives if the search space is restricted, e.g. "there are no ordinary adult African elephants in this closet," which restricts the search space by having a limited volume and by disallowing magical elephants that could somehow be in the closet unnoticed.

Your example of the chair as a negative is bunk! No it isn't, Ed. "Chairs don't exist" is a negative statement. It is easily shown to be false by example. "Gods don't exist" would likewise be shown to be false if someone could come up with an example. If you want something a bit less trivial, "Coelacanths no longer exist" was thought to be true until one was found off the coast of Africa in 1938. Just because you haven't seen or felt or can't see or feel something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It doesn't mean it does exist, either. I know that, Ed. Believing in thinks you can't see & feel is called faith! And I have faith God exists. I know you don't, Merlyn. If it can't be proven you don't seem to want to acknowledge it's existence. And that is sad. Why, Ed? Is it sad that you don't acknowledge the existence of unicorns? By the way, Ed, I'll ask again: Hence my point is made! What point, Ed?

Hence my point is made! What point, Ed? Your original "point" was flatly wrong -- you CAN disprove a negative. Your later point about not being able to disprove gods is exactly the same point made at Camp Quest about not being able to disprove unicorns. So what point are you talking about Ed? Do you now believe in unicorns because you can't disprove them?

Ed & skeptic, you've missed the point. Of COURSE I can't disprove gods, ANY gods. OR unicorns, or any number of things. This is not a good reason to believe in gods or unicorns. That's what "you cant prove a negative" MEANS, and that's one thing Camp Quest is trying to show kids. But this elementary bit of logic escapes both of you. Now, since none of you can prove that unicorns don't exist, do you believe they do exist?

What the article doesn't mention is that Ed Kagin is an ex-Eagle scout and he started Camp Quest in response to the BSA's kicking out atheists. And Ed: "And you can't disprove a negative either." Wrong, Ed. It's easy and done all the time. Here's an example of a negative which is easy to disprove: "Chairs don't exist." It's easy to disprove it if you can find a chair. But prove that unicorns don't exist. You can't, because the search space is the universe. Even if you can't find one, you can't be sure they aren't somewhere else. Maybe you should go to Camp Quest, Ed. They teach critical thinking and logic.

I would never accuse you of doing that, Ed. Fred, how about a youth group that teaches good citizenship, which doesn't immediately hobble itself by excluding "undesirables" based on identity politics, and a long history of dishonesty? Just a thought.

To be more exact, proposition 8 reserves the word "marriage" for heterosexual unions; it doesn't change the earlier ruling that there must be a same-sex equivalent. It just can't be officially termed "marriage".

Here is an editorial in response by PZ Myers: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-myers22-2009may22,0,1521283.story Why is Charlotte Allen so mad at atheists? She says it's because we're boring. More likely, it's because we speak out against the intellectually bankrupt beliefs of religion. By P.Z. Myers Charlotte Allen is very, very angry with us atheists -- that's the only conclusion that can be drawn from her furious broadside in The Times on May 17. She can't stand us; we're unpopular; we're a problem. What, exactly, is the greatest crime of modern atheists? We're boring. I can't actually argue with that. It's true. We're all just ordinary people -- your neighbors, your friends, your relatives. I know atheists who are accountants, real estate agents, schoolteachers, lawyers, soldiers, journalists, even ministers (but don't tell their congregations!). Our leading lights are college professors, scientists, philosophers, theologians and other such pedantic, scholarly riffraff. For entertainment, they read books, and if they want to do something ambitious and dramatic, they write books. I'm one of them, so trust me, I know -- we don't exactly live the James Bond lifestyle. Calling us boring is a fair cop. But still -- why would anyone get angry about that? I find myself bored witless by games of chance, but I don't write irate letters condemning all card players and demanding the immediate shuttering of all casinos. I'm afraid I don't believe Allen. There are other motivations behind her denunciations, and they aren't as simple as that she finds us boring. She should drop the pretense that the objectionable part of our character is our lack of excitement. What really annoys Allen is that in our books, blogs and media appearances, we challenge religious preconceptions. That's all we do. It's admittedly not exactly a roller-coaster ride of thrills, but it does annoy the superstitious and the fervent true believers in things unseen and unevidenced. We are also, admittedly, often abrasive in being outspoken critics of religious dogma, but it's also very hard to restrain our laughter and contempt when we see the spectacle of god-belief in full flower. We witness many people who proudly declare that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 years after the domestication of dogs, 5,000 years after the founding of Jericho and contemporaneous with the invention of the plow. They cling to these beliefs despite contradictions with history, let alone physics, geology and biology, because they believe the Bible is a literal history and science text. We find much to ridicule in these peculiarly unreal ideas. We live in a world where the majority of the population are quite convinced that they have a direct pipeline to an omnipotent, omniscient being who has told them exactly how to live and what is right and wrong, and has spelled out his divine will in holy books. Unfortunately, there are many holy books, and they all disagree with each other, and of all these multitudes claiming possession of such a potent source of information, we similarly see widespread disagreement. This god seems to be an exceptionally unreliable oracle -- most of what he has supposedly said is wrong. We atheists do take glee in pointing out God's lack of consistency, which I'm sure Allen finds irritating. Contrary to Allen's claim that we aren't interested in criticizing the important elements of religious belief, we are: We go right to the central issue of whether there is a god or not. We're pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does. It wouldn't be a place almost entirely inimical to our existence, with a history that reveals our existence was a fortunate result of a long chain of accidents tuned by natural selection. Most of the arguments we've heard that try to reconcile god and science seem to make God a subtle, invisible, undetectable ghost who at best tickles the occasional subatomic particle when no one is looking. It seems rather obvious to us that if his works are undetectable, you have no grounds for telling us what he's been up to. Allen requests that we atheists take religious belief seriously. We do; it's hard not to take seriously a bizarre collection of antiquated superstitions that are furiously waved in our faces in our schools, on television, in our politics and even on newspaper editorial pages. That we take the intellectually bankrupt beliefs of religion seriously is precisely why we do question it, and will continue to question it, in our boring way: by simply speaking out.

Beavah, if you don't want to be called a liar, don't lie. Simple. Just like your fake hick accent. By the way, I won't call you a liar for not knowing about my son, since you didn't state it as if it was a "fact" that you somehow knew. I will, however, call you a now-typical BSA member who feels free to insult atheists on phony pretexts.

Mark Ray on the scouts-l list found this response to the article: http://www.learningforlife.org/nav/Response/index.html

Do you always issue disingenuous apologies by deliberately misspelling the person's name? And by the way, you haven't hurt my feelings, but you never did clarify why I supposedly need to apologize to the SA -- is it for correctly summarizing their discriminatory policies to SA members? Given your rather emotional and hypocritical posts towards me, it appears the "hurt feelings" are the product of projection. If I've hurt your feelings, you'll just have to deal with it yourself. No apology from me.

I was mistaken Ed, and acknowledged it as soon as Trevorium pointed it out. I typically call people "liars" on here when people make up some position and claim I hold it, as if they can read my mind. There's no other term I'd use other than "liar" for people who do that sort of thing.

That's me all right Chug; there ARE atheist members of SA, but they officially exclude atheists as leaders (youth members are OK). This started when newspapers reported that atheists could join SA, and later an official SA representative told a group (I think it was the British Humanist Association) that atheists could NOT be leaders. You'll notice that I'm arguing with people who claim that atheists are permitted as adult leaders, when the SA has stated that they cannot be leaders, and the SA website says they cannot be leaders (hint: look for their ironically-named policy of nondiscrimination). Sure, people can lie and get in. That doesn't change the official policy. Just looking in http://www.escouts.org.uk, there's a thread from 2008 on "Should Athiests Be Allowed to Be Leaders?" [sic], so it still appears to be in effect. Notice my conversation is from four years ago, so it looks like either I was right, or the SA is terrible at getting their new admission standards out to the public.(This message has been edited by Merlyn_LeRoy)

vol_scouter writes: Merlyn, I see nothing more personal than your attacks and accusations at others. You usually lose your arguments and attack others. Got any specific examples?

If 'scouter' does not apply to cub scouts (or didn't back circa 1967), then I used the wrong terminology, Trevorum.

No. Apologize for what? OGE, are personal attacks permitted in this forum?

Beavah, as long as you advocate that public schools ought to be able to violate the civil rights of atheists, I'll keep pointing it out.