Girl Guides unveil new secular oath
- The Girl Guides are to drop references to “God” and “country” from their traditional pledge but are to retain a public expression of allegiance to the Queen.
And a patriotic commitment to serving their country is to become one to the “community” in the oath taken by Brownies and Guides when they join the organisation.
But in a consultation which attracted almost 44,000 responses Guides made clear that they wanted to retain a public expression of allegiance to the Queen, who is also their patron.
Good on them for dropping God - that kind of stuff has no place in a modern, civilised country. Religious beliefs are your own business.
Not too keen on the other wishy-washy bollocks though.
David Landrum, advocacy director of the Evangelical Alliance said: "No doubt, the Girls Brigade will be the main beneficiaries from this erroneous decision, because as the growing poplularity of faith schools attests, parents will always seek to provide religious rather than secular humanist values for their children."
These two clockwork morons being upset makes me intensely pleased.
As a Brownie Guide leader, this affects me.
I'm not really fussed what the promise is. The girls learn it, say it once, and then never bother with it again.
We don't have any Christian things in our group (although several of the girls are Christian) apart from the promise and the song at the end (Brownie bells).
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If you don't believe in dragons it is curiously true, that the dragons you disparage choose to not believe in you.
Around here in Austria the scouts never were so deep into religion when I was there. If you have a groupleader that is very religious, then he will bring that in, but we had many atheistic groupleaders as well. So the religious told us to be nice and help others because of god, and the others teached us to be nice and help others, because its a good thing for society and us all. ^^ We did lots of stuff together with or for the church, but simply because the church is responsible for many charitable activities and fundings around here, and so they often worked together and were happy for us helping them, like helping for the church street market and so on. Our priest always thanked us for being nice and helpful children, and never cared for our religious believes. So we had muslim and atheistic scouts as well.
As long as the scouts keep focusing on the part with "helping each other" I dont see the problem for religious people, because from my view the important thing for christian people should be to focus on charity and good deeds, and thats what the scouts around here are still doing, so they help with a lot of charity stuff, are gathering littered garbage on their hiking days and so on.
Or for religious people: 1. Johannes 2 1-6: You shall measure people on what they do and the harvesting of their doings, not on what they say. ![]()
