Scouting-related

• I pick Daniel up from Scouts and he's changing his indoor shoes for boots. He hands me his boots and I look at him, wondering what he thinks I'm going to do with them, seeing as how we're not going home in the car and I don't have my backpack.
  
  "So Mama can you take them and..." he pauses for a moment. "I dunno, put them in whatever magical place you seem to put all the stuff we give you?"
  
  
  
• In other scouting-related news, Justin is going to talk to his Cub leaders about not saying the part of the oath where he "promises to serve God," because he feels like he's lying to himself and to his leaders when he says that, because he doesn't believe in God.
  
  Ambivalent doesn't come anywhere near describing how I feel about this.
  
  Proud that he thinks about this stuff. Sad that it bothers him. Odd that it's not me, the atheist parent, who's talked him into atheism, but Chris, the agnostic-Buddhist one. Uncertain as to the depth of his atheism and leaning towards believing that he doesn't really understand the spiritual viewpoint he claims to have. Mindful of the fact that I held the same beliefs, at about the same age, and after a long wander through agnosticism I came back to them and found myself believing pretty much exactly the same as I did back then - tempered with a bit more respect and understanding of other religious/spiritual beliefs - no more "deeply" than I had before.
  
  And that's not even touching any of my ambivalent feelings about atheism itself, and emotional maturity, and The God Delusion, a book I have yet to finish despite starting many times just because of the intense emotional and intellectual discomfort it causes me...
  
  Way too many diametrically opposed emotions and beliefs to untangle there. Will go to bed instead.