Almost immediately we ran into issues concerning our religion, or lack of one. Viv was told that there was a process in place that she could go through to become a leader if she so desired, later that evening Viv raised some objections to Seth having to write in a prayer book and asked if he could write an affirmation rather than a prayer, at that point she explained that we are atheists and were no comfortable with the children writing a prayer. Shortly after that revelation the offer to become a leader was withdrawn with the explanation that atheists were not allowed to be leaders in the scouting movement.

Back in the distant past when I was a cub I vaguely recall the “G” word appearing in the pledge we all said each meeting, at the time I was attending sunday school (and later fellowship) so it didn’t really register that this was unusual.

I hit up Google with the query “Religion in Scouting” and found a page devoted to it on wikipedia.

From what I read the founder of the scouting movement Robert Baden-Powell was of the belief that “spirituality and a belief in a higher power were key to the development of young people” he codified this belief in the rules of the scouting movement. Initially spirituality meant Christianity but in later years the growing popularity of the scouting movement lead to a softening of this stance to include non-monotheistic religions such as Hinduism and those that do not recognise a personal God like Buddhism.

Viv and I have been agonizing over what to for the last week.

I sent an email to the scout leader to see if my understanding of the situation was correct, text of email below (names withheld) ….

My name is Daniel Drysdale, my son Seth has recently started attending Joeys.

Last week my wife Vivien was told that she could become a leader if she was interested but upon disclosing that she is an atheist the offer was withdrawn.

I spent some time researching the issue of religion in scouting and found that Robert Baden-Powell held that spirituality and a belief in a higher power were key to the development of young people and that this belief forms the core of the scouting movement he founded.

My wife and I are atheists and have made sure to shield our children from religious beliefs so far, we do not have any issues with people of faith but we do not feel that exposure to religion is appropriate for children at such a young age.

Given all of that my question to you is simple.

Is there a place in the scouting organization for a member who is an atheist?

and to extend that a little..

If my son continues attending Joeys and moves on to cubs and later scouts, if he chooses to be an atheist will there come a time when he is excluded or discriminated against within the organisation due to his atheism?

I would really appreciate a prompt response as I am seriously considering pulling him out of Joeys before he gets too invested in it.

I received the following response

A core Principle of Scouting, is that a member of the Scout Association, whether youth or adult, must have a belief in a God.

My understanding of the rules, is that there is no place in Scouting for a person who does not have a belief in a God, because that person would not be able to adhere to this Principle.

Upon investment to the Movement a promise must be made by a Joey ; I promise to love my God….. and by a Cub and Scout and Leader ; On my honour I promise to do my best to do my duty to my God……….

I then replied

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I was expecting exactly this response but was secretly hoping I was wrong.

Sadly we will have to remove Seth from Joeys and cancel our plans for enrolling Callum, it is a real shame as aside from the religious issue we love the idea of scouts and we know it would have been fun and rewarding for the boys.

I understand that this is a clear case of “Their club. their rules” but it seems a crying shame that such a small issue should ruin an otherwise excellent organization.

We could of course either let Seth embrace a personal God or have him lie and pretend to be one of the group, neither option is palatable to us.

I find it interesting that Buddhism is allowed, with no concept of a personal God, is ok but that my own worldview of Secular Humanism is not.

Sadly without a Bill of Rights and legal protection from discrimination on religious grounds there is nothing we can do about it.

Now we have to break the news to the boys and there will be tears…

If anyone knows of a secular equivalent to scouts please let us know.

[UPDATE] While typing this post I was contacted by someone further up the food chain in the scouting movement and told that the definition of “my God” is very loose and can accommodate virtually any belief.

It feels a bit dishonest but we are going to see how it plays out, we are going to write “Humanist” on the application form for religion.

Click the images to see them at full resolution…

You can definitely see a big improvement in the HDR photo, the original photo is overexposed all over the place, granted neither image is spectacular but I certainly can’t see a downside in enabling the feature.

I was talking to one of my brother-in-laws last Sunday about image stacking and HDR and today I get HDR built into my phone…. Sweet!!

The phone is gorgeous, everything about it is magic.

Now I am coming from an iPhone 3G which was getting a little long in the tooth and for the last couple of months I have been running various builds of iOS4 which on the 3G is just terrible.

There are hundreds of reviews of the iPhone 4 from people with more patience and better writing skills than I so I won’t even attempt to review the phone here.

So far, and I’ve only had the phone for less than a day, I have not been able to cause the phone to lose signal. My house gets ordinary coverage on Optus, somewhere around 2 at most 3 bars, and even doing the “Death Grip” I can only get it to drop to 1 bar. Suffice it to say I am not too concerned about “Antennagate”. I’ll keep you posted on how it performs over time.

Just for fun I decided to try Facetime, it looks cool in the ads but I figured it was one of those features that demos well but is largely useless, I called one of my IceTV ex-colleagues down in Melbourne and I will say Facetime rocked!!! The feature only works over WiFi and we have ADSL2+ (capped at 8MB down/1MB up), the video quality was great, audio was fine and it was much more engaging than I thought, it’s well worth taking it for a spin.

[Update: Since I started writing this post I found out that one of my sisters also got an iPhone 4 today so I "Facetimed" her as well it's fun, give it a try...]

Samuel Alexander Whyte

He was born around 3:00am, weighing 7 pounds and approx 50cm long

(Sorry about the vagueness of the stats but that’s all I was given)

Sam continues the tradition of an all-boy family joining his brothers Michael, Lachlan, William and cousins Seth, Callum, and Jack and cousin-in-law Toby.

We’ll be popping down to visit Rachel, Ged, Sam and the gang on the weekend.

Well done Rach & Ged….

When we filled in the paperwork to enrol our children in primary school there was a checkbox on the form to indicate your preference with regards to scripture class. Being atheists as we are we naturally ticked the option to have them not attend scripture.

At the intake interview a teacher checked through the paperwork with us and when they came to the scripture information quizzed us on the reason for our choice. I was somewhat offended by the question as it was my understanding that it is entirely our choice as to whether our children attend or not, I chose not to make a fuss and explained clearly that we are atheists and feel very strongly that scripture class is something we do not want our children exposed to. The teacher explained that she was only asking in case we were concerned about the denomination of the class, it was apparently a non-denominational class in case we were concerned.

This was a little over a year ago and in the intervening time we had made our wishes known verbally to the relevant members of staff, scripture class does not commence until the second year of primary school so we had put it on the mental back-burner.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when our eldest son’s class started scripture lessons… Can you guess what is coming???

Against our strict written and verbal instructions our son was indeed sent to scripture class.

As you may imagine we were not happy to say the least.

At this point it is probably worth explaining the reason for our objections.

We are not against religion per se (well I am but my wife is far more moderate than I), but rather our objections lie in the fact that scripture is taught within the school in a setting that to the children is indistinguishable from their normal secular studies.

In our minds this blurring of religious and secular instruction adds unwarranted weight to the religious material being taught.

Our nightmare scenario would be for the children to accept the religious material as fact in the same way that they would accept subjects like Maths or English.

On the way home from school that very day our fears were realised, our son when questioned about the scripture class told us that “God exists because school says it does”, we couldn’t have scripted it any better ourselves.

That night I drafted a letter to the principal outlining what had happen and how we feel about it, I spent an hour on it trying to make it as clear as possible while keeping it free of emotion, it was not easy I will tell you, I am probably the most even tempered person on the planet and I was really angry.

We had a meeting with the principal a few days later, seeing as the damage was already done I would have accepted a written apology. In the meeting we again explained how we felt about it all and that as far as we were concerned the damage was done but if we ever had a repeat of the incident we would certainly escalate it as far as we could.

It turns out that the list of non-scripture people was not given to the supervising teacher (who was a casual on that day, as was the teacher with the list) which brings me to the point of the post, what should the default position be for scripture?

The principal tells me only about 5% of children opt-out, my understanding was that statewide it is about 20% so I guess we are in our own little “bible belt”, so in the absence of other instructions our son was put in with the rest of the flock.

We talked about opt-in vs opt-out with the principal and he said that the general rule, due largely to apathy on the part of the parents is to opt-in. While this is a reasonable position given the 95/5 split it seems to me that not all choices are equal.

Imagine if the choice was whether to eat a peanut butter sandwich or not and 5% of the children were allergic to peanuts, or if the class in question were sex education (a hot button issue for some people, personally I’m disappointed that our school doesn’t offer it at all), or perhaps if a “Christian” child was made to attend a Muslim class….

The problem in this case is that religion is seen as completely safe so accidentally sending atheists’ children to scripture is “harmless” so there’s no need to make sure the substitute teacher has the list, I certainly don’t think it is harmless and I hope more people come to that realisation.

Thanks to the magic of salary sacrifice I’ve updated my late 2006 MacBook Pro to a shiny new 17″ Core i7 MacBook Pro.

The old machine has served me well these last three years but it has really started to show it’s age. Lately for work I have needed to spend more time working in a virtual machine, the 2GB of RAM and 140GB hard drive on the old machine were just not cutting it.

Specs for the new machine

• 2.66GHz Core i7
• 8GB RAM 1066MHz DDR3
• 17″ Anti-glare display (1920×1200)
• Intel HD Graphics 256MB DDR3 + GeForce GT330M 512MB DDR3
• 500GB 7200 RPM HDD

I haven’t had much time to play with it yet but it is certainly much snappier than the old one.

I ran GeekBench 32-bit on the new and old machines (the 64-bit version of GeekBench is paid only)

The GeekBench score shows a 58% increase in performance which will definitely make life easier for me.

On top of the obvious advantage of having a shiny new machine I will be passing the old MBP on to Viv so now I will actually be able to use my laptop at night when the kids are in bed

See below for the obligatory un-boxing photos, I apologise for the poor quality, my camera was out of juice so I took these with my iPhone 3G.

Had some fish and chips with Viv and the boys, now it’s playtime.

Posted via web from danieldrysdale’s posterous

After years sitting on the sideline watching what will probably be the last physical format war for video I have finally decide to get me some blu-ray.
 
My setup at home is best described as modest, consisting of speakers I bought about 15 years ago, a receiver I bought second hand from my a/v obsessed brother-in-law at least three receivers ago for him.
 
My TV is a 50″ panasonic plasma, alas only a 1366×768 panel, but a good performer.
 
I have a few devices already hooked up including an AppleTV that I use for “Channel BT” content, a TiVo and a BeyonWiz DP-S1 for over the air TV broadcasts.
 
Prior to this purchase I was using a cheap-ass Tevion DVD player from Aldi, the jaggies it added to my movies nearly made my eyes bleed.
 
I plugged the new guy in, I had to shut off the TiVo for the moment due to a lack of cables, the BeyonWiz is looking after me, and found that I needed to apply a firmware update, no great surprise.
 
At the moment I have no Blu-ray discs to try so all I’ve done is check out some DVDs and the in built YouTube access.
 
I spun up “The Two Towers” and was really impressed with the image quality, the player was upscaling to 1080p.
 
The player is badged as a region 4 DVD but just for fun I threw in my region 1 copy of “Apollo 13″ and bugger me, the disc played with no problems.
 
The image quality on “Apollo 13″ was not as good as “The Two Towers” there was a lot of grain but I think that it was always like that.
 
I tried out YouTube and although it works the UI was pretty craptacular. I can already watch YouTube content on my AppleTV and my iPhone so I can live without the feature on my Blu-ray player.
 
The player can also handle DivX, BUT, only via USB or off a disc. There is a fraking Ethernet jack on the back, would it have killed then to add an smb client?
 
My BeyonWiz and my AppleTV can handle DivX just fine so again I can happily live without this feature on the Blu-ray.
 
I look forward to sampling some Blu-ray content in the not too distant future.
 
Hint: it’s my birthday next month
 
I’ll post again later when I’ve partaken of some Blu-ray goodness.

Posted via email from danieldrysdale’s posterous

Posted via web from danieldrysdale’s posterous

I was impressed with the story, it was well written, backed by science and about as unbiased as  commercial networks get on a prime time current affairs style program. ( 60 Minutes, I’m staring at you buddy. )

I started seeing promos for last nights program that made me worry, it felt like they might be going to focus on “The Other Side” of the debate. It was with quite some trepidation that I sat down last night to watch the followup.

I was all ready to hurl a heavy object through my TV….

Fortunately for me and my TV this didn’t happen. What I saw last night was clearly an attempt to provide a forum for the anti-vacc movement to have their say while still keeping things firmly based in reality.

The panel featured Prof. Peter McIntyre from NCIRS ( The National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance ) and Dr Giselle Cook (apparently the only doctor they could find that was anti-vaccination and willing to appear on the show).

The started with a recap of the previous weeks’ story and then allowed questions from the audience.

The most vocal audience member was, as I expected, Meryl Dorey of AVN (Australian Vaccination Network). The AVN claim to be all about “Empowering the people to make informed choices”.

Their website looks professional (if you ignore the numerous typos) but seems to be largely concerned with attacking the traditional medical establishment and spruking “Alternative Medicine”. There were plenty of things you could buy from them and an easy way to donate to the cause, but I couldn’t see any links to peer reviewed articles or studies.

To me the AVN seems to be all about muddying the issue, spreading doubt and making a tidy profit on the side.

I was very pleased to see that Prof McIntyre was easily able to refute Meryl’s claims and that Mike Munroe stepped in to rebut her as well.

When asked about her professional qualifications Meryl Doyle stated that she has been researching the issue for 20 years and has a brain.

When asked why she provided no evidence for her claims she stated she sent many studies and the names of vaccination victims to the Seven network. Mike Munroe denied that they recieved her evidence and stated that the victims she named refused to speak with them…

Please check out this link to a post on “The Skeptics’ Book of Pooh Pooh”, the poster was actually at the debate and has a lot to say about it…

Here is a link to a post from the father of Dana McCaffery that everyone should read…

The debate ended up with the anti-vacc movement calling for “More information” so that parents can make an informed decision….

This tactic, we need more information, crops up in many areas as a means to create doubt in the minds of the audience. The fact is that vaccines have been studied, tested and retested for as long as they have been around. The risk factors are well known and understood, the information about the risks is readily available.

The problem is that not that there is too little information for parents but rather that there is too much information to wade through.

As a parent myself I can attest to the fact that it is easy to become confused and overwhealmed with all the information that you are bombarded with by friends, relatives, healthcare professionals etc

Unfortunately many parents choose not to read what they are given, they don’t ask enough questions of the healthcare professionals looking after them and their children.

In todays modern, frantic, ADHD ridden, push responsibility onto others culture we want to be spoon feed everything and make sure there is someone to blame when it all goes pear-shaped.

Taking the time to read the information ( Click here for the comprehensive Australian Government immunisation guide ) is probably the most important thing that a parent can do. It might be a pain and require some commitment but to put it bluntly it is part of your job as a parent to make informed decisions based on the most accurate information you can get access to.

If we can put the emotional outbursts aside (which I admit I have a lot of trouble doing) and approach this issue with logic and reason backed up with a through thorough education then it will be clear what the right choice is…