So, the girl guides are changing their oath from "God, queen and country" to "Queen and community".

If they are dropping God and country why are they retaining queen and why "community"?

The world's going madder by the day.

If you have any interest in the Girl Guides, then the Jimmy Saville police want to interview you.

But to answer your question, god doesn't exist, country music is shi'ite and they are big fans of Joel McHale.

With "wit" like that you could start a civil war in the Middle East.

1. Because the Queen is their patron
2. Because "community" is more relevant than "country"

There already is.

I wouldn't have kept Queen in there, personally, but it's a welcome change that guides will no longer be required to pledge an oath to a fictitious entity.



In what way?

There was a guy interviewed on the radio today from the Humanist Soc who used almost those very words, when asked why they should leave "The Queen" in there but remove "God" he said "Well I expect its because the Queen is a real thing"

I suspect rather related: [url=http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8932301/atheism-has-failed-only-religion-can-fight-the-barbariansin an article in the [iSpectator[/i last week,[/url the Chief Rabbi declared that, in the future, intellectuals will be astonished that anyone was an atheist in these times.

Okay, that's a simplified version.

But much of what he appears to be saying (apart from, in essence, there being no morality or altruism without a god) is that 'our culture,' without religion, will fall.

It's an argument that is appearing rather regularly these days and does, indeed, remind me of the view espoused on this forum by Dally and Dally Jnr that religion is important. But only for 'those others', not for them, of course.

Part of it is simply the ramblings of people who think that their own belief of choice is not as popular or as influential as in previous times.

But part of it genuinely seems to be held as a view that religion is the glue that binds us. It's a view that is often seen on the [iTelegraph[/i forums.

Such people never seem willing to actually explain what pieces of theology they believe – or to explain what one is to do if one does not believe in the central tenets of any religion (the most central being, of course, the existence of a god).

See the comments on that piece. Atheists apparently breed less – which will also forward the demise of western civilisation.

I find myself wondering if what they all mean is simply that everyone should feign belief and attend church dutifully each week. Or do they have some magic pill that everyone can take in order to genuinely believe? Themselves included, perhaps?

Is it real, extended faith they crave from everyone – or just a preparedness to go along with the forms. And breeding, of course.

It is quite, quite extraordinary.

Why should a child with no religious beliefs be forced to make some meaningless "oath" to a "god" they have no belief in?

Adults who do not believe in a god (and even those who do) don't even have to swear an oath to a god in the gravest criminal trials. Why should the Guides anachronistically be an exception? It's plain common sense - unless such as Dally want the Guides to be exclusively for "Christian" children, which (although something the Guides themselves got past a long time ago) is I suspect pretty near to the mark.

In response to Mintball's general remarks, religious fekkwitery is on the rise in some areas, because all flavours of religion have understood that there needs to be coercion and peer pressure for the game to succeed, and the places where various religions have a strong hold are invariably places where you are, to put it neutrally, not welcome unless you subscribe to that particular lunacy. Certain large areas of the US seem to be in the thrall of cults and I have the impression it is getting worse.

Mintball's post makes the real point. People say they are ethical, have morality, etc but as I have speculated umpteen times, that's more often than not because they or their parents were exposed to a degree of religion and of course our national and continental "culture" is Christian - a religion. Totalitarian regimes suppress religion for a reason - as it imbues a moral resistance to the states ideology.

As more generations are brought up without the "moral compass" of religion so our society will tend towards break down. Except, I do not believe it will because there will be a religious revival to fill the void.

Don't talk (again). Is it really your position that we need religion to know not to kill, or not to steal? If The Bible or The Koran had not been written, do you seriously believe that we'd all be unashamedly raping and enslaving one another?

Most people are good because they're good, not because a book tells them to be. Indeed, if you are only good because your religion tells you to be, then you're a pretty ty human being.

This.

But I'd go further, too often religion removes the requirement to consider your conscience and allows one to outsource one's moral compass to someone's interpretation of what seemed like a good idea thousands of years ago when atoms, planets, the universe, other continents, evolution, refrigeration, cells, bacteria, etc etc were not even suspected never mind known about.
i.e. Knowledge was tiny compared with what we know today... and as knowledge increases, so old beliefs look more like superstitions.
Without a conscience and being genuinely answerable to ones own inner sense of right and wrong, one is falling way short of being able to claim that one is a "moral" person.

Not only that, but most Christians ignore numerous Bible verses because they consider them to be irrelevant, outdated, or just plain old wrong.

Just a few examples from Deuteronomy:

[i“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days."

"But if the thing is true, that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father's house."

“A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God."

"And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you."[/i

And from Leviticus:

[i"You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material."

“If a man lies sexually with a woman who is a slave, assigned to another man and not yet ransomed or given her freedom, a distinction shall be made. They shall not be put to death, because she was not free; but he shall bring his compensation to the Lord, to the entrance of the tent of meeting, a ram for a guilt offering."

"You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard."

"If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death."

"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them." (A big favourite of Dally's, no doubt)[/i

[i"If a man lies with a woman during her menstrual period and uncovers her nakedness, he has made naked her fountain, and she has uncovered the fountain of her blood. Both of them shall be cut off from among their people." [/i

So, if we know that keeping slaves, treating women as property and stoning rape victims is wrong, where does this knowledge come from? Not from the scripture, which wholeheartedly endorses such abhorrent practices, but from our own innate sense of what's acceptable and what is not.

Wasn't guiding founded with a Christian ethos at heart?

If being a girl guide was restricted only to those children who have Christian parents (I refuse to use the term 'Christian child'), they'd probably lose more than 70% of their membership overnight. If the girl guides are going to allow children whose parents are not Christians to be members, it makes sense not to compel them to pledge an oath to a 'God' they don't believe in, doesn't it?

But wouldn't that be similar to sending your kids to church and then complaining when they're made to say prayers?

I don't expect that all girl guides would be Christian but if I sent my daughter there (that is if I had one) I wouldn't complain that she has to give an oath to God even though I don't attend church.

According to the woman who looked like she worked there on Breakfast this morning, no. According to the ranting Christian woman, yes

No. If you go to church, you go to pray. If you go to the girl guides, you go to tie knots and shlt.

The Brownie pack that my two went to involved jumping over a toadstool in their initiations.

Thinking about it now, was that the Brownies or that druid cult that used the back room of the village hall on the same night, can't recall now, maybe we sent them into the wrong room.

Yes but society has moved on.
Whilst the basic tenets of the morality and philosophy apparently preached by Jesus are generally accepted nowadays (by some because of their religion but by many more via their own conscience) the superstition and belief in a deity are no longer mandatory and the Guides have changed the oath accordingly without making it in any way unchristian.
They are to ba applauded for that.

On this basis, these islands, pre-Christianity, must have never seen any 'ethical' or 'moral' behaviour. Altruism will not have existed either, since as the chief rabbi claims, that is a result of religion.

Or were the pre-Christian religions that existed across Europe, which had a very, very different ethos from the Judeo-Christian tradition that some people tend to imagine is the only one that has existed in Europe or the only religious culture that has ever existed alongside something that could be viewed as 'civilisation'.



Out of curiosity, then, what theological/religious beliefs do you hold personally, and how often do you attend a place of worship?

Maybe but I think totalitarian regimes suppress religion largely because religion is a power base.

It's worth noting that some totalitarian regimes have supported and been supported by organised religion.

It could also be said that some religions at least push behaviours and attitudes that most people in modern, civilised nations consider backward at best and reprehensible and utterly immoral at worst.

If you want to acknowledge that as an influence, then you must also accept that Christianity is itself a conglomeration of influences from prior religions and cults in terms of ethics, morals, rituals and myths adapted to suit the Christian story.
The old testament (much of which Jesus preached against, hence the antagonism from and fear of power-base-shift by the established order at the time but which still seems to form part of Christian belief), Dionysus (virgin birth on Dec 25th, changing water into wine, a divine saviour who was the son of God, resurrection and ascension into heaven after 3 days), paganism in Europe (Easter, mistletoe etc)

Just add in the monotheism ... and there's Christianity.