Posted on 11/05/2002 12:27:48 AM PST by kattracks
SEATTLE (AP) — An Eagle Scout who has earned 37 merit badges said Monday he has been kicked out of the Boy Scouts for refusing to declare a belief in a higher power. Darrell Lambert said he was told of the decision earlier in the day by the Chief Seattle Council, the Scouts' regional governing body.
"Am I bitter? No. Disappointed? Yeah," he said. "We're in the 21st century. Our country was founded on religious freedom, and the Boy Scouts of America are still discriminating."
Lambert said he plans to appeal the decision within the Scouting council within the required 60 days.
On membership applications, Boy Scouts and adult leaders must say they recognize a higher power, although not necessarily a religious one.
As a private organization, the Boy Scouts can bar anyone it chooses from membership. The organization's ban on gay leaders was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000.
The issue arose about a month ago, after Lambert attended a Boy Scout leadership training seminar where he argued with a Scout leader about whether atheists should be expelled from the organization.
Last week, the council said it would give him about a week to declare his belief in a higher power. Lambert refused, saying that to lie would make him a bad Scout.
The Irving, Texas-based Boy Scouts of America did not return calls seeking comment Monday.
Lambert, 19, said he has been an atheist since ninth grade, when he concluded that science had disproved the accounts of creation given in the Bible.
He had declared his atheism to the Scout leaders overseeing his Eagle Scout application last year, but was still granted the award.
"They commended me on my honesty," he said.
His mother told CNN that no one in their family attends church, and that her husband is also an atheist.
"Darrell's not just fighting this for himself. He's fighting this for all the Scouts that have no real belief in God," Trish Lambert said.
Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This fight IS worth it for me and thousands and thousands of other scout parents. I WANT my sons to be in scouts for many reasons, one of which is that scouts offers (a rare) non-Church program in which a belief in God is affirmed and encouraged, and in which my sons can be around men and young men who are not afraid to be reverent, not embarrassed to talk about God, and who model reverence. I cherish the scouts as one place where my sons can have this experience. In a society that increasingly looks for ways to negate and repudiate a belief in God, scouts offers the opposite to millions of boys and young men.
Well, scouts should attempt to see if the kid is sincere in making such a statement. If he appears to be, they should let him back in.
Good one, Nuke'm! Clinton is the anti-Boy Scout.
You're in an outer universe somewhere, MedicalMess, if you think that affirming a belief in God is equivalent to nazism! Come back to our universe, MM!
The Scouts pledge includes the phrase "God and country" ... what did this athiest expect from the Scouts? I'm getting sick and tired of the few trying to change something that fills the needs of the many. If you don't agree with an organization and refuse to abide by that organization's bylaws, get out of it.
It's really disheartening that the scouts - which has never bad-mouthed anyone (and which teaches true tolerance for other's beliefs - even when they don't agree with them) - should come under relentless and brutal attack from those who would like to homosexualize the scouts and those who wish it to drop its affirmation of God. The most telling thing is that these opponents of Boy Scouts won't start their own scouting organization - where they can put as many homosexual men in charge of teenage boys as they want, and where they can repudiate a belief in God to any degree they want. It's a free country - but they'd rather destroy something good than to organize an organization that believes as they do. They are being profoundly uncharitable and intolerant.
No, of course they don't. They assume that boys are being honorable when they say the oath. In this case, that assumption was proven otherwise by a boy who saw fit to take an oath on a constant basis that he didn't believe in.
That wouldn't be any fun. It wouldn't make his point and it would be too much hard work. It's easier, cheaper, and more fun to trash somone's else's home than to build one of your own and allows others to trash it.
You appear to be aptly monikered!
What you people can't stand is someone who doesn't believe like you do.
You have more than adequately demonstrated that point right here on this thread.
If this troubles you so much, I suggest you get off the keyboard and start your own Athiest Scouting Society. Instead of the BSA, yours would have the acronym ASS. You will, of course, be free to kick out any of those horrible Christians you hate so much.
It's a start. If you can't even start to comply with the rules of a private club, why should you be allowed to continue in it?
This kid doesn't want to fall in and continue to be a scout according to the BSA's rules. He wants the scouts to fall in and continue to be with him according to his rules. Like many atheists, he's on a personal power trip.
If he were really an honorable and principled atheist, he would simply quit the group, wish them the best, and get on with his atheist life.
And since he continued to affirm the oath, at that point he became a liar, and violated the scout law AGAIN (..morally straight..). So he violated the oath not in just one way, but in two.
When he became apostate, he should have dropped out of the Scouts.
Wait a minute. It's not "you people" who kicked this kid out of Scouting. It was the Boy Scouts themselves who did this. How are Freepers who are only discussing the issue doing "more harm than good"?
I was a Boy Scout, and at least doctrinally, the Boy Scouts are a religious organization. It's no coincidence that so many troops meet in churches. The Scouts recognize that nobody is perfect, and that it is very rare for a person to always live up to all of their ideals. That's why you don't kick out Scouts who are sometimes spendthrift, or dirty, or rude. Or whom don't always live up to the ideals of Christianity.
The difference is that this kid is flatly stating that he has a fundamental disagreement with one of the basic tenets of the organization. It's not a case of him failing to live up to an ideal -- it's his complete rejection of that ideal. And saying its unChristian to boot this kid out of Scouting is just ridiculous. A Christian should love an atheist as much as anyone else, but that doesn't mean you elect him your pastor. And in terms of this harming Scouting, I think retaining him despite his public rejection of one of the tenets of Scouting would make them look like enormous hypocrites.
If this kid wants to be involved in a program like Scouting that lacks a religious component, there are plenty of them out there. There's Y Guides, for example. But if you're really concerned about how booting out atheists will affect scouting, you might want to weigh that against how many other parents who got their kid involved in Scouting because of the religious aspect might drop their support for Scouting if it became non-religious.
I never said they didn't have the right...
I just said it was ANTI-CHRISTIAN.
It was ANTI-AMERICAN.
It is a politically bad move which shouldn't have been made.
Here... let's try this on you. Let's say you are one of the 120 million Americans with a chronic condition and I'm the only one that knows how to cure your condition. And then let's say I'm going to let you die for whatever reason I want to make up. Is that fair?
Under your view... of course it's fair. There is no law that says I have to give you that information at any price. And I don't care to associate with you so I guess you die.
It would be ANTI-CHRISTIAN.
It would be ANTI-AMERICAN.
It is a politically bad move which shouldn't be made since I derive my income from public donations.
But I like atheists and I don't like you and the sooner these diseases spread and we effectively cut you religious scum off from treatment the more of you we can get rid of.
Got a family...? they die too.
I believe the Supreme Court was right on freedom of association. I believe no scout troop should ever allow homosexuals in because of the sexual assaults and disease issues. I believe the atheist issue is a bad decision that will come back to haunt the scouts and I believe it causes missed opportunities for human development of childrens character.
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