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DWise1_AOL

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Everything posted by DWise1_AOL

  1. I have a copy of the 1911 Handbook (an original, not a reprint). Pg 10 lists the twelve points as an "abbreviated form of the Scout Law". It is this form to which the scouts "are to commit to memory". Pg 15 Provides the laws "which relate to the BSA, are the latest and most up to date". 11. A scout is clean. He keeps clean in body and thought, stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travels with a clean crowd. There you go. It was with BSA pretty much from the beginning if not actually from the beginning. It was also not with Lord Baden-Powell's original Scout Law, so
  2. This is perhaps too close to the ground to be representative. After the death of my son and my wife's self-imposed alienation, I found solace in the dance classes that we had been pursuing as a couple. Such that group classes are still my main form of a social life. In one class is a homosexual whom I am very proud to call my friend. In listening to his conversations with our teacher (female) , there is a sizable homosexual population within the LDS. My ballroom instructor, very obviously gay, is also Mormon. If the Mormon Church wants to deal with homosexuality, then it need
  3. packsaddle: Sorry about that. She means a lot to me. KDD, a friend in my two-step class tonight offered a real-world case. She's an office manager who had lost her long-time job over a year ago when the viable company she worked for closed down because the banks refused them a business loan. For more than a year she tried to find work but, being too old and unable to accept a ridiculously low salary she had no luck. During the past year, she has used up almost all of her savings just to be able to survive. Her boyfriend has an advanced degree in mathematics with practical engineering
  4. KBB, ever see Steve Martin's movie, "L.A. Story"? Loved that movie! He was a TV weatherman. The weather reports for Los Angeles were always the same, so he took a day off and just reran an old "sonny" forecast when in reality a major storm hit that sank the station owner's boat. KBB, have you ever had to troubleshoot a PC? You look at the symptoms and you try to figure out what's wrong. If you're right, then you're a hero, but if you're wrong then what the ?, we just have to replace a computer. Have you ever troubleshot a person? You look at the symptoms and you try to figure out
  5. Yes, the mediocre students can indeed become exceptional late-bloomers[/i]. Everybody has the potential to exceed his/her past performance. But what about now? Isn't that what we are talking about, now? The unexceptional can become President of the United States with the right daddy and party backing? Yeah, OK, so what? You don't have a rich and powerful daddy with a legacy? You just want to keep your job? If you just want to keep your job, then 70% is not enough, but then it never has been enough. If you just want to keep your job, then 100% is not enough. It u
  6. OK, so what is your avatar's origin? I know that it is not the Resistance ("Star Wars") and certainly is not the symbol of the Twelve Colonies of Kobold. Care to enlighten us?
  7. moosetracker, could you please refer us back to the posting you are responding to? I find this site particularly difficult to navigate, so any trail signs you could leave would help immensely. I have suffered the great misfortune of having had a friend talk me into taking her Baptist mega-church's DivorceCare program (though her ulterior motive was to not take a competing program on the same night as the Single Ministry's dance classes since the ratio of men to women in those classes was typically 50:150 and also since I was one of the few men who had any clue how to dance -- apparently a
  8. The most recent copy of The Boy Scout Handbook that I have is the 10th edition, 1990. Pages 553-561 present and discuss the Scout Law. As I recall, the first part of each section quotes from official BSA Rules and Regulations or Bylaws, whichever is the actual source (sorry, I haven't read those since the 1990's, though the last time was after BSA had banned access to them, since I had bought copies when they were still sold in the Scout Shop). On page 561: The discussion that follows mentions physical dirt, which is unavoidable but which can be washed off, and "moral dirt" (my own t
  9. A commendable approach, Basementdweller. Run the program within the troop as it should be run and act as a buffer between the troop and BSA. Continue to keep BSA as far away from your unit and from your people as is possible.
  10. Yes, packsaddle, I agree with you that that is what we teach students in school. And it is the first in the list of "The Wrong Lessons: Things NOT to Learn in School": And if you want to present George W. Bush as an example, then I'm right with you on that one!
  11. No, absolutely not! BSA has proposed outside of its actual rules, regulations, bylaws, etc, the existence of a rule that requires "belief in a Supreme Being". Such a rule has so far not been determined to actually exist. For that matter, in court in the case of Randall v. Orange County Council the judge did directly order BSA Orange County Council to produce such a rule and said Council Exec, Kent Gibbs, did directly inform the judge that no such rule in fact actually exists. Boy Scouts America, Inc, admitted in court that there is no such rule requiring "belief in a Supreme Being."
  12. True enough, but the point does remain.
  13. This last election, we had a Mormon running for President. I very personally observed and personally experienced what happens when Mormons take over an institution, such as BSA, Inc. For backing, I refer to Penn and Teller's ZBullshit! episode which cited the Mormon take-over of BSA in the 1980's. I did not vote for Romney, but it was not because he is a Mormon. Really, there were so very many problems with voting him, Mormonism was the least of my concerns. But still, having seen what an absolutely mess they have made of BSA, how could we ever trust them with the US government?
  14. Yeah, well, LDS is kind of a ... OK , not really a mixed bag. A lot of Mormons are personally decent folk. But the entire community/church/political/court-room thing can get rather weird. And through a gay friend or two I've been picking up on some extra Mormon weirdness with regards to homosexuality within the community, but I'm not qualified to speak on that except to say that there is something going on there. For normal district-level stuff, there can be a lot of frustration felt by non-Mormons. There are district-level Camporalls planned and executed, but all the Mormon units pul
  15. I am not trying to arbitrate truth, but truth must be served! You side yourself against seek truth. That is what your religion requires of you, so I cannot speak against that. But my own religion requires me to seek out the truth, so of necessity my posts must seek out the truth while your own posts must avoid the truth. OK, that is how it is, even though it seems evil to me. But I have to ask you just what you mean by this: "The Wise One (@AOL.com) arbitrates ... grammar for forum posters." Just what the frak are you talking about there? And I only call liars those who deliber
  16. I have been an atheist for over half a century. I have several bibles. Some King James Version (which was commissioned because King James wanted a bible that emphasized the Divine Right of Kings as opposed to the more egalitarian Geneva Bible), searchable files thereof, a German Keppler Bibel (which was the first bible that ever gave me any indication that the ending of Mark was added onto the original long afterwards -- that extraneous ending includes the accounts of the Resurrected Christ being observed and that verse that spawned the cults about safely handling venomous snakes and drinkin
  17. Back when I was involved in the 1990's, Youth Protection was a big red-hot item. On the surface, it looked like BSA was pro-actively addressing the problem. And yet at the same time, BSA had a horrible reputation among youth programs in its refusal to inform other programs of problem adults. As I understand it, though I do not know the legal reasons why BSA was forced to do this, it was only within the past year that BSA has finally had to release its files. And in our YP training, part of the attitude was that the training was more for our own protection than for the boys'. Part of the c
  18. Then do please stop playing semantics and stop projectin. And I know better than to call your kind "friend". Another youth movement with different name and different objectives would not be Scouting. BSA holds a monopoly on Scouting in this country. Despite it's being held hostage by religious bigots. A youth movement that is not Scouting is not nor have ever been the issue. We are talking about Scouting being available to all. If you want to exclude anybody, then you had damned well be able to provicde a cogent argument for their exclusion. Officially published BSA
  19. This puts a lie to the claim by apologists for BSA discriminatory practices that all those excluded need to do is to create their own Scouting organization; eg, "Atheist Scouts", which I believe I've seen them offer. BSA holds a monopoly on Scouting in this country and they have a long history of suing anybody who tries to create an alternative Scouting organization.
  20. I have tried, but it's Eagledad who's led us astray here. OK, you want to lead us further astray. I agree that a lot of Christians don't know enough about their religion. Usually they've grown up in it, had "put in their pew time" as Mike Doonesbury put it, know everything they're supposed to do say in the rituals, but they never really learned anything about it. A similar situation has been described to me about the effects of the phenomenal growth of fundamentalism during the "Jesus Freak" movement of circa 1970, in that the churches had to abandon the traditional program th
  21. As far as I can tell, creationism has nothing at all to do Look at that sentence: "And I see it doing major damage to Scouting when BSA practices its lying and hypocrisy." What does "it" represent, what does it stand in for? It stands in for: "when BSA practices its lying and hypocrisy". Common English sentence construction. Hopefully you won't want me to graph it for you, given the lack of graphics support for such an effort. And I don't think your offer would work. After all, I've agreed with them on a number of things but it makes no difference to them. And now with qwa
  22. Do Hindus drink water? Yes. I drink water. Does that make me a Hindu. I don't think so. IOW, you don't need to be a zealot to take things out of context. All you need is to want to force a source to say something that it does not say and which somehow serves your own dishonest motives. The term for that is "quote-mining". Actually, yes it is saying that. Since non-Christians would not meet the clearly stated requirements for receiving the Fruit of the Spirit, they would instead receive the fruit of the flesh, none of which includes being nice. Of course, it is absolu
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