Religio

A lovely photo I found on this blog here, this is apparently of two boys posing in the uniform of a Roman Catholic group of the Boys Brigade.

There's an article on the Boys Brigade on the HBU website here. The Brigade actually predates the Scouts by some years. It's also quite explicitly Christian, whereas Lord Baden-Powell's ideal was for Scouting to be spiritual but only in the context of "religions" in general. ('No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws. So every Scout should have a religion.')

Writing from the point of view of an old British imperialist, of course, this attitude may very well have seemed to make sense to old B-P. Unfortunately it rather bespeaks a wishy-washy attitude to truth and reality that has since permeated western society generally, with disastrous effects morally and culturally, and has left religion, in Scouting and elsewhere, to decline into religio in the ancient Roman sense of nothing more than superstition and exotic mumbo-jumbo.

And just as Rome declined, it would appear that the latterday West is poised to go much the same way.