Since Camp Quest is not anti-religion (right?) the Texas branch is being hosted by, get this, a “Church of Freethought.”
The little tikes whose parents want to ensure are raised as atheists will have quite the jam packed schedule at the first Camp Quest in Texas as the summer camp experience will consist of one single day.
Perhaps these kids are exceptional as it is claimed that on this one single day (which I imagine is not a literal 24 hour period) the camp seeks to:
provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech and the separation of religion and government guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States…learning about different animals, making pottery, and having lots of great fun.1
Granted, someone ought to alert Camp Quest of the difference between the Constitution’s establishment clause and a letter written by Thomas Jefferson but surely, they are more than qualified to teach the kids how to improve the human condition, rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech and do it all, and more, in one day-right?!?!
Regarding Camp Quest’s concept, Rod Dreher reports,
The idea, [Richard] Dawkins said, is “to encourage children to think for themselves.” Yes, well, as long as they don’t think well of religion, tykes are welcome to join his herd of independent minds…
It’s hard to see the pleasure of sitting around the campfire, learning from grown-ups that the world is disenchanted after all. (No ghost stories for you, lad!)…
Hmm. One doesn’t quite know what to make of an atheist church. Most people, when they cease to believe in the Easter bunny, don’t hold monthly services to celebrate the non-existence of a peripatetic paschal rabbit. But you know Dallas: We’re so religious that even the atheists go to church. For the record, at their next service, the freethinkers will focus on invisibility. Ah, reason.
Most atheists I know don’t care for religion, obviously, but aren’t angry about it. Not so the True Unbelievers – the Dawkinses and their followers – who prove that you don’t have to be religious to be a fundamentalist…
John Gray, an English atheist political philosopher who, in his 2007 book Black Mass, argued that contemporary atheists have thrown off Christianity but still hold a religious faith in a secular utopia and the perfectibility of humanity…Though latter-day atheists would prefer to ignore it, their intellectual forebears, the 19th-century Positivists, passionately believed that there was nothing wrong with the world that suppressing religion and replacing it with science couldn’t fix.2
This sounds like the Harrisian School of one word answers to all of the world’s ills. Sam Harris does not only blame “religion” for what people do in its name but he also blames “religion” for atrocities committed by atheists and blames “religion” for the taboo against rape.Sam Harris “argued” thusly,
I would argue that the taboos around rape that religion has given us, have perversely made rape a very common tool of psychological oppression and war. The reason why all those women were raped in the Bosnian conflict was that it was so stigmatising in the Muslim community to be raped, that you were essentially ruining the community from within by recourse to its own taboos. This has been the practice over and over again.3
If only “religion” (God actually) did not proclaim rape as evil then it would not be evil and militants would not think to rape women since their motivation was to stigmatize Muslim women-right?!?! Apparently, if it were not for God condemning rape the invaders of Bosnia could have raped at will and Sam Harris would have said, “there’s nothing more natural than rape.”
Rod Dreher also notes,
The religious sense – of awe, of mystery, of a need for meaning – is hard-wired into our species, which is why Gray, a nonbeliever, identifies a “funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human.” He’s certainly correct to warn that the attempt to repress the religious instinct (as with the sexual instinct) only means it will reappear in some other, degraded form – the operatic pseudo-paganism of the Nazis, say, or the Soviet Stalinist cult, or even, more benignly, the faintly ridiculous idea of an atheist church.
Indeed, he terms is “pseudo-paganism,” I term it “neo-paganism” (as described here and here).
Camp Quest would fare better if they simply be upfront about their premise. Clearly, there is the public relations side of Camp Quest’s facade and there is the reality of their methods and goals.
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