No one is suggesting that BSA give up its endorsement of God or anything relating to Scouting or the role of Scouting in promoting good citizenship and positive values. BSA respects a wide diversity of inconsistent religious beliefs among its members. There is no need to make an exception for atheists. Accommodating atheists requires little more than respecting the right of individual Scouts to disagree with the theistic beliefs of the majority. Nevertheless, in practice this is easier said than done.
Religious diversity can be difficult, it can be a challenge, it can require effort to work.
Many people regard theistic belief as a universal and fundamental truth, principle, ethic, and social necessity. BSA is taking the easy route of catering to the strong feelings of the sizable anti-intellectual conservative segment of its membership that refuses to even permit fair consideration of atheistic world views as having possible legitimacy. To uphold this closed-minded approach they seek to limit social exposure to decent neighbors who hold honest atheistic world views. The result is an insidious, self-perpetuating circle of negative caricature and discrimination. People who claim that BSA's religious component is inseparable from BSA's aims or of equal importance to the aims are projecting their own religious beliefs into the argument and are therefore engaging in nothing more persuasive than circular reasoning, which no doubt is sincerely persuasive to them but still irrelevant to justifying a policy of penalizing nonbelievers for their nonbelief.