I was drawn to an article by
Melanie Phillips entitled: ‘An unholy war in the Guides and why we must ALL
fight the secular bigots’.
In 6 days time the Guides
will change the historic promise made by all Guides and Brownies from ‘to love
my God’ to ‘be true to myself and develop my beliefs’. The organisation will
also drop the promise, ‘to serve my country’, which will be replaced by ‘to
serve my community’.
Chief Guide, Gill Slocombe states
that some girls found the old promise confusing, but the new wording would be
easier for Guides to make and keep .
The Guide movement has had a
historic link with the church with many local groups still meeting in church
premises. The change to the Guide promise has therefore outraged many
Christians, who perceive it to be a step by the Guiding establishment to accommodate
itself with the rising tide of atheism and secularism by jettisoning values
that are timeless.
Melanie Phillips does’nt mince her words in contextualising the issue: “It
is, indeed, the principal weapon of unholy war wielded by the forces of
militant secularism, which are intent upon destroying the Judeo-Christian basis
of western morality. It supplants traditional morality and the concepts of
right and wrong, truth and lies by a creed which says in effect, ‘Whatever is
right for you is right’.............So the new Guiding promise is all about
being true to me, myself and my beliefs, whatever they may happen to be. It
represents the antithesis of duty to others. It says, more or less, ‘I promise
to serve myself’.
It is a promise for a narcissistic, self-centred and
morally vacuous age.”
These sentiments were reinforced this weekend by Lord
Sacks, Chief Rabbi who has been one of the country’s highest profile religious
commentators for the last 22 years. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme
he said Britain is ‘losing the plot’. Referring to the 2008 banking crisis, Lord
Sacks said: “When you begin to lose faith and society becomes very, very
secularised, you first see a breakdown of institutions, whether they are
financial, economic or… marriage is an institution......
And then you ask why they have broken down and you arrive
at one word: trust. Trust means having faith in somebody else to keep their
faith with you, so there’s something about religious faith that undergirds
trust as a whole in society and when trust breaks down you see institutions
break down.
Individualism is no way to build a society... if people
work for the maximum possible benefit to themselves, then we will not have
trust in industry, economics and financial institutions, we will not see
marriages last.”
Wise words from the Chief Rabbi!!
As a born again person of faith, I am thankful that the
Bible is both the bedrock and backdrop for my life. Thus I can truly say that
it is faith in its author, the living God who makes life worth living, giving
me great hope.
As the great old song written by Edward Mote, a pastor at
Rehoboth Baptist Church in Horsham, West Sussex says:
My
hope is built on nothing less Than Jesus' blood and righteousness;
No
merit of my own I claim But wholly lean on Jesus' name.
On
Christ, the solid rock, I stand; All other ground is sinking sand,
All
other ground is sinking sand.
Let's build our society on the solid rock of faith, not the sinking sand of atheism and secularism.
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