What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Guides and God

    So, am I all up in arms about Girl Guides dropping their promise to love [their] God[s]?

    No, I don’t think so. I suspect God can take it.

    This is what the Girl Guides used to promise:

    I Promise that I will do my best;
    To love my God,
    To serve my Queen and my Country,
    To help other people
    And
    To keep the Guide Law.

    Now they are going to say this:

    I promise that I will do my best:
    To be true to myself and develop my beliefs,
    To serve the Queen and my community, 
    and
    To keep the Guide Law.

    This doesn’t seem to me to be particularly troubling. It looks as though Guiding wants to be modern and inclusive. I’m just a little surprised they’ve kept the Queen in there which surely must exclude republicans.

    I don’t expect that Guiding will change significantly by changing that promise except to allow some girls to take part who might once have thought that it was not for them because they were not religious.

    The “self” has a complex relationship with religion. And Christianity is something of a mixed bag when it comes to the self. On the one hand it is all about losing your self and being lost in God and service of others. On the other, we are told to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, which sounds a bit like a good starting place for a lot of modern therapy.

    “Unto thine own self be true” is an injunction that sometimes is wrongly attributed to the Bible. It isn’t, it is a misquote in any case and comes from Polonius speaking to Laertes in Hamlet: “This above all- to thine own self be true”.

    I think that God will survive the Guides’ change of wording and I hope that Guiding will flourish as a result of trying to keep up with the times.

    However, you can see an enormous shift in ethical thinking taking place between those two versions of the promise. The self is paramount in modern thinking. I think that’s an inevitable thing. I also think that it is a good thing. We’ve not thought nearly enough about the self in the past. Somewhere inside though, I find myself thinking that focusing on the self is not an absolute good. Some things within the self may not be good. Presumably the injunction to serve the community in the Guide promise is an attempt to mitigate that.

    If I’d been a Guide taking part in their big consultation about the promise, I’d probably have wanted something included about preventing harm. I think that’s a good direction to follow for ethical thinking and can cover the self and others.

    I like the new Rainbow promise though:

    I promise that I will do my best to think about my beliefs and to be kind and helpful.

    You can find the inside skinny on this from a Guide leader at Some Random Bint’s blog.

    , , , ,

5 responses to “Tanzania”

  1. Raspberry Rabbit Avatar
    Raspberry Rabbit

    A bit picky, yes. Idris will no doubt correct them when he’s there.

    Reply
  2. Simon Sarmiento Avatar
    Simon Sarmiento

    Umm. So Northern Ireland is part of Britain is it?
    Four churches in the UK maybe.

    Reply
  3. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

    Well Simon, you are correct in your assumption that I was thinking of the Church of Ireland in Northern Ireland, rather than perhaps the Church of Rockall.

    People who are being picky deserve to be picked up for slack talk. However, speaking as I do from the Second City of Empire, I hide behind this quote on the website for Number 10 Downing Street:

    http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page823.asp

    “The United Kingdom is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

    Great Britain, however, comprises only England, Scotland and Wales. Great Britain is the largest island of the British Isles. Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic form the second largest island.

    The UK is just under 1,000 km long from the south coast of England to the extreme north of Scotland, and is 500 km across at its widest point. It shares a single land border with the Irish Republic. Despite its relatively small size the UK boasts incredibly varied and often very beautiful scenery.

    The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are not part of the United Kingdom. They are largely self-governing with their own legislative assemblies and systems of law. But the British Government is responsible for their defence and international relations.

    On this site the term ‘Britain’ is used informally to mean the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

    I’d also refer interested parties to the Wikipedia page on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles_naming_dispute

    I offer this topic as a free gift to Bishop David.

    Reply
  4. Bishop David Avatar
    Bishop David

    As you would expect, I am all knotted up on this one. I am a citizen of Ireland – or the Irish Republic – or the Republic of Ireland. Nor Eire – or, as many of my parishioners in Portadown would have called it [never having moved on from 1922], the ‘Free State’. Meanwhile President Mary MacAleese is often termed President of Ireland which seems to me to be as notable a piece of ‘overlooking’ as when Ian Paisley refers to the ‘people of Ulster’ [which means some of the Protestant/Unionist population of Northern Ireland] and Gerry Adams refers to the ‘Irish People’ [which means not the Protestant/Unionist population of Northern Ireland]. I like Wiki’s rather coy description of Ireland as ‘currently split’ – meaning just the most recent 85 years. Which in the context of thousands of years of British misrule in Ireland is but a blink. And finally one comes to the interesting use of the term ‘mainland’ …

    Reply
  5. steg Avatar
    steg

    Must admit when I saw you were writing about primates in Tanzania I thought your blog was going to be about ape conservation………………….

    In my experience people from outwith the UK confuse Britain and England a lot. And they have a point. Do you always refer to the Netherlands or sometimes to Holland even when you are refering to the non Holland bits of the Netherlands? And how do you think that makes the Friesian’s feel? And so on.

    Reply

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