User talk:Ozscout


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Scouts Australia
I think your edits to Scouts Australia are incorrect, as also does User:HiLo48. More importantly if you want to change the emphasis of the article in this way, after consensus has been established for several years, you need to produce sources. Wikipedia is not about what you, or I, know or think. It is about what sources say. I hope you will help us to improve articles on Scouting and Guiding in Australia, according to wikipedia policies and guidelines. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  01:40, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi Brian, I'm a Brian too. You seem to be implying that things can't change if they've been around for a number of years? How's the old flat earth bit working for you? - just kidding. I am a current leader and was reading the scout section and the bit on religion was just plain wrong. The fact that HiLo48 agrees with you is nice but doesn't make you right. I'm sure that if I wrote something against creation science I would get more than a couple of people disagreeing. Any test of logic would show that if an organisation insisted someone had to have a belief in a god AND was required to make a promise to a "god" regularly, then the atheist is obviously excluded from that organisation. I have linked to the relevant Leader Support Guide in the article, I should also link to the scout law and promise - as a new contributor I'm still finding my way around. What I've stated is fact and is supported by the scout law and promise and the published leader guides. If you think atheists are welcome in scouts can you please add the relevant sources? --Ozscout (talk) 12:14, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi Brian. As I have indicated on the article talk page, Scouts Australia does not require you to make a promise to a "god" regularly. It requires you to make a promise to "my God", a wording that is unique to Australia I think. This places the onus entirely on the individual and nobody can say that your definition of "God" is improper. I know little of Scouts Australia in Victoria, but I was on the Group Committee of a Group in the NT for many years. Religion seemed to take a very low place in the scheme of things. I could easily have become GSL or another leader position. There may be few strident atheists as leaders, but I am pretty sure there are very many leaders with no real belief in any form of religion, and some of them are very high up in the organisation. To return to wikipedia, one of the hardest things to understand when you start is that we are not interested in what you know as a fact or what you deduce logically. It is called original research and is not accepted. We rely only on sources. An increasing problem for Scouting articles is that Scouting web pages are often short of facts as they concentrate more and more on just selling their product to recruit young people and adults helpers. Links to official policies are often just not there, and there is also a lack of historical accounts. It makes it difficult. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  01:35, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

That's just semantics. MY god has to be A god. If I define "my" god as something intangible and something removed from the mainstream version of a interventionist deity I am still asked to refer to it as a god. I started off on the group committee as well. If you were an atheist you could not have gone through training and become a uniformed leader as there is a point in the training where you have to officially take the promise. Apart from prayers at the start and end of every meeting and camp/hike/outing and an inter-faith "scouts own" when on camp on Sundays, (and the religion badge) you're right - religion has very little to do with day to day scouting. I have never met any atheist scout leaders, I regularly interact with leaders from all over our region and I would not have any idea of any of their religious views. It just doesn't come up in conversation because it really is irrelevant to what we do the bulk of the time. --Ozscout (talk) 20:56, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

No, I do not think it is semantics. I think it is significant that, alone of all Scout Associations (I think), Scouts Australia uses the term "my God" and not "God" as they do in UK and the USA. We need to find a source about when this was introduced and what reasons were advanced for its introduction. If a leader chose to make the promise with the view that it was an empty or null promise because he did not have a God, there is nothing Scouts Australia would do about it if, when asked, the person said "My God is my business". I think you really are meeting much more religion that I came across in the NT. There we had prayers at the end of a meeting, not at the start. There was no Scouts Own at weekend camps unless it was a major District do. About twice a year there would be a church visit to one of the local churches but there was no compulsion and both my kids went once and never again. I never came across a religion badge - do you have details as it should be mentioned in an article? It sounds like more than I experienced in the UK also. BTW, I do know about training. I was an Assistant District Commissioner for Leader Training in UK, a member of the National Leader Training Board and on the training team at Gilwell Park for a week every year for a few years in the 1960s. I know I trained several leaders with no real notion of God. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  22:24, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

The badge is the faith awareness badge (http://www.scouts.com.au/main.asp?iStoryID=15733697) Requirements are; 1. Know and explain the basic principles of your religion or a religion of your choice to your Advisor by: a. discussion or     b. completing a project such as a scrapbook or poster. 2. Participate regularly for at least three months in religious services of your choice. 3. Know and explain why we use prayer. Make up a simple prayer for use at home, at one of your Pack meetings or at Scout's Own. Learn about one other religion of your choice and discuss it with your Advisor. It is semantics. If I said you had to kneel and face mecca and pray to Allah but "really" in your mind you could substitute MacDonalds for mecca and chocolate cake for Allah it would be OK. The whole world would think you were a practicing islamist. If Scouts were serious with their "my" god they should make it optional, like the queen part in the promise. I just spent a week in London (last week in Nov - before the big chill) and visited Baden Powell house while there - would have loved to have gotten to Gilwell but didn't have time. --Ozscout (talk) 00:36, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If they made it optional, they would get in trouble with WOSM, which insists on the word "God" or an equivalent appearing. Using "my" seems to be getting as close to optional as they can. I just spent an hour without success looking for information on when and why it was changed to add "my". The only information I found is that it was after 1973. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  01:47, 28 December 2010 (UTC)