Pagan explanation for the Scout Association

I reverence the earth.
I reverence life – all life.
I reverence all creation.
I reverence the Creator.
I reverence the gifts
of the Goddess
in every aspect
of life.

I value the changing
of the seasons,
the differing beauties
of each new day;

I value everyone's uniqueness,
the shared joys
of working beside others,
discovering unities
in our differences.

I value myself,
and my role in life,
and my place in
the world.

I value life
in all its forms,
and respect it,
and do my best
not to bring harm
to any part of if.

I value my right to choose
my own path through life.

Everyone picks the path
that seems best
to them.

This is mine.



So tell me: exactly which part of this makes me a pædophile?


*****

Earliest date I can find for this is April 2007.
-------------------------------------

I started in Scouting in the mid-70s – the youngest in our family was a boy, so mum took him to Cubs; they needed help, so she joined in, then dad did, then …

Over the following eighteen-plus years I trained and qualified as both a Cub Scout and a Scout leader.

In the late 90s I had to take some time out to get my head sorted – I was under a lot of stress and suffering deep depression, partly due to trying to resist admitting to myself that I could no longer honestly call myself “a Christian” and that “pagan” would be more accurate.

By the early 2000s I was feeling well enough to want to rejoin – only in the Scout Fellowship (retired and other people who don’t work directly with the kids, but help out in the background at district events, etc), to see how I got on with that before I tried going deeper.

Apart from anything else, I’d become visually impaired and didn’t know how well I’d be able to cope with a bunch of energetic kids when I couldn’t see them clearly. But I thought it’d be interesting for the kids – and other leaders – to have a disabled leader, to discuss the differences.

On the form I had to fill in there was a question on religious/spiritual direction. Scouting insists that members have a spiritual leaning: agnostics can join, but atheists can’t.

I put “pagan” in the space provided – I was advised to put “agnostic” or even “atheist”, but thought that, for once I wanted to be totally honest – besides, I thought that it might be interesting, for kids – and leaders – to discuss this difference, too.

The district secretary told me that he’d contacted Scout HQ to ask what kind of promise I should make (the standard Scout promise is a Christian one, but they have other variants for other faiths). He wanted to know if there was a pagan one.

Their immediate response? I had to be “kept away from the kids at all costs”.

Never mind that I already had 18+ years as a Cub and Scout Leader with not even the suspicion of a shadow of a doubt against my character; never mind that I had never acted with anything other than the utmost probity towards the young people in my care.

I was a pagan, and therefore a pervert who’d drag the kids off to the woods to perform satanic rituals on them whenever we went camping.

They obviously didn’t, and probably still don’t, have any idea what “a pagan” actually is, and they probably never bothered to try to find out.

They didn’t contact me to ask, I’m not aware of them contacting the district secretary (who’d known me for almost all those 18+ years) to find out what kind of a person I was.

They didn’t even know enough to know that “Satan” is a Christian invention and that only Christian sickoes perform “Satanic rituals”.

So I wrote the above poem (apart from the question at the end, which I added later) and sent it to them, but I doubt that they ever bothered to read it: they’d made up their minds, why confuse them with the truth?

I understand that children and young adults need to be protected from potential predators, and I thoroughly approve – I’d been through police checks to become a leader before, and I’d come up with the scent of roses. Children have to be protected from perverts.

But why automatically assume that anyone who doesn’t follow the dry, dusty, colourless road of a well-trampled mainstream religion must be a pervert?

Why didn’t they bother to check what form my spiritual beliefs actually took before they made up their middle-class Christian minds?

When the district secretary told me what they had said, he laughed: he knew me, he’d known me for nearly two decades; he knew how ridiculous the very idea was.

But, sadly, the Scout Association didn’t know, and very probably still doesn’t.

There have, unfortunately, been some instances of Scout leaders sexually abusing the children in their care: I bet most of those leaders had “Christian” on their forms.