National Secular Society plumbs new depths of absurdity
This blog has a long standing interest in the antics of the National Secular Society, or National Sausage Society, as we now prefer to call it. (for reasons that are explained here ). I'm not the first to comment on this (David Keen did already ) but their latest attention seeking stunt is a classic of its kind. As the BBC website tells us, "atheist children are being excluded from the scouts, the NSS has warned in a letter to Chief Scout Bear Grylls." Readers may remember from their own distant childhoods, that the new scout makes a promise to "to my duty to God and to the Queen". I remember saying it myself, and it meant what you might expect it to mean to the average 11 year-old, the "region of ill-defined piety", as Patrick O'Brian describes it in one of his books (though I don't think he was talking about scouts). I do not recall the march of atheism being a burning issue among my contemporaries in the 9th Ampthill & Woburn, but per...