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Is is common that eagle advisors or mentors say to boy scouts " I am going to be your devil's advocate"? My son is Life and trying to get his eagle and during two different situations he was told the sentence above by two different people. He had just come back from a church camp for confirmation and was shocked. I don't like it much either. Is it some kind of a scout thing?

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Don't be shocked. The term "devil's advocate" originates with the Roman Catholic church. During the process of considering a candidate for the various steps along the road to official RC sainthood, the church appoints a member of the Roman curia (the RC church bureacracy) to try and find any and all reasons why the candidate is unfit to be canonized. They take on this adversarial role in an effort to prevent any dubious canonizations. The slang term for these priests is "devil's advocate". So, the use of this term by your son's advisors means that they are going to do him the favor of scrutinizing everything about his application for Eagle, in the hope of finding any problems before they become unsurmountable. For example, did all of his ranks get entered properly into the national Scout database? Stuff like that. Good luck on his project.

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