If raising one’s child according to one’s faith is “child abuse” (as per very many militant activist atheists) what is raising one’s child according to anti-theism? “Re-education” seemed appropriate (de-education came is as a close second).
The UK Independent has reported on atheist re-educations camps for the children of parents who want their children to think exactly like they do.1
Atheists have become the latest group to cash in on Britain’s booming summer camp industry by creating the country’s first-ever retreat for irreligious children.
The camp, “Camp Quest,” was founded in 1996 AD and is a “godless alternative” the slogan of which is “Beyond Belief.”
The camp is for,
atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view.
Anti-supernatural and “Beyond Belief.” one can only imagine what those poor little children are taught. Actually, they are surely taught the same thing in public school classrooms where atheism is smuggle through the backdoor or, actually, directly in through the front. “That’s right kids, all that stuff about the supernatural is poppycock! Everyone knows that matter is the eternal uncaused first cause and that the universe and absolutely everything in it, including you, is a result of serendipitous coincidinc!”
Maybe they can be told what Prof. Richard Dawkins stated during his 1991 AD “Christmas Lectures for Young People”:
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA_It is every living object’s sole reason for living’_fulfilling a purpose of propagating DNA_There is no purpose other than that.2
Next we find that the adults who run the camp, perhaps commensurate to their level of emotional maturity and intellectual prowess, engage in debate with little children as the camp revolves around “discussions about religion and non-belief” and features:
The centrepiece [sic; UK sp] of the camp is an ongoing discussion where participants are encouraged to try to disprove the existence of unicorns, which serve as a metaphor for God.Campers are told that two unicorns live in the area and cannot be seen, heard or touched. The adult councillors pretend to believe in the unicorns on the basis that an ancient book handed down through the generations says they exist.
The children are encouraged to try to prove that the unicorns do not exist. If anyone is successful they will be awarded a £10 note which has a picture of Charles Darwin on it and is signed by leading atheist academic Richard Dawkins.
I thought that Charles Darwin was not used to promote atheism?!? See, I knew that promoter of youth rebellion against God promoter Prof. Richard Dawkins was involved somehow. But a £10 note reward? Please, the camp costs £275 to attend, what kind of deal is that?!?
Apparently, the adult indoctrinators do not know the difference between a necessary being and a mockery. Scientific observation and philosophic consideration of the universe infers a creator and can even alert us to certain characteristics while the mockery is a straw-horse readymade to be toppled (see here for a featured discussion of natural theology the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorns in the relatively near future).
Let us review: we have a “godless alternative” that is “Beyond [theistic] Belief” for “atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view” where little children are made to engage in sham debate adults and rewarded with a glorification of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins.
Get the picture?
Well, Camp Quest does not:
The organisers remain adamant, however, that the camp will not have a proselytising “atheist agenda”.
“We don’t teach children not to believe in God, we simply tell them it’s OK not to believe in God,” said Edwin Kagin_founder of Camp Quest_“The idea of the unicorn debate is not to prove God doesn’t exist, it is to illustrate that having such debates with religious people is futile because in the end faith trumps everything,” said Miss Stein [Samantha Stein, organiser of the British version of Camp Quest].
Also, in keeping with the general intellectual prowess demonstrated by the Camp Quest crew we find some comments about attempting to talk children into believing, as stated by Samantha Stein,
that it is OK to be an atheist and that a lack of religion does not mean a lack of morals or ethics.
One parent, Crispian Jago, agrees with this goal,
“We’re a non-religious family but not anti-religion,” he said. “A lot of my religious friends insist their morality stems from a divine source rather than a natural one but I want my children to know they can have morals and ethics without needing to resort to a faith.”
Note that the premise of atheist morals and ethics is anti-theistic. Moreover, they appear to mistakenly correlate morals and ethics. While this is very common and ethics is sometimes defined as a body of morals; morals denotes mores and while ethics denotes the actual ethos. One is description of what is and the other prescription of what ought to be.
In reality this is another of the very many examples of Atheism’s Public Relations Problems in terms of the disparity between the atheist public relations claims and their actual modus operandi.
Why do professional atheist indoctrinators and parents simply admit that they too want their children to believe just as they do?
Since I have already written about this in another blog I will move that post over here in a few days.
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