I love the idea of a summer camp free of religious propaganda and dedicated to rational, scientific inquiry. I’d send my kids there:
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There is such a summer camp. Check out http://www.camp-quest.org. There are six locations in the USA, including Bible Belt incursions in Florida and Tennessee, plus outposts in Ontario and UK.
I went to a science camp as a kid. Learned about biology (including evolution), outdoor survival skills, building model rockets and RC cars, photography, etc. Was great fun.
It wasn’t celebrated as an “atheist camp”, but this is Canada, people look at you weird if you don’t accept evolution.
Hey, the camp even has a website now. http://hilaroad.com/
That takes me back. Looks like they’ve seriously upgraded the facilities. When I went there all the campers slept in tents out in the field. Each tent had 2 wooden cots with a mattress, so at least it was reasonably comfy.
Don’t get me wrong, I like sites like UF and The Atheist Experience out of Austin, TX; it is nice to know there are other people out there who think
like me.Oddly, this camp seems to gain its notoriety from being the anti-Jesus Camp, and the bus ads that theorize “there probably is no God” suggest the notion that we are arguing for our side against an opponent who has an equally legitimate case. To me, it is akin to creating an organization called the Round Earth Club to ward off the lunacy of those who would argue otherwise.
I wonder sometimes if we lend substance to their ridiculous beliefs by fighting them? Or do we risk being swallowed up by uncontested theocracy?
A Round Earth Club would make perfect sense if most of the world’s population insisted that the world was flat. Yes, it would be great if we lived in a civilization where no one spent any time or energy talking about the supernatural and the word “atheist” took its place in oblivion next to “non-astrologer”… but we don’t.
On the other hand:
– Arthur C. Clarke
I firmly believe it to be the latter of the two, reckonr. It’s much easier to follow your delusions when there is no alternative presented. Think of it as opening a menu at a restaurant and there only being one choice, pasta. You order the pasta. Two options creates possibilities.
For some reason I cringed when I heard of this idea. I guess in the same way Christopher Hitchens cringed when he heard about how Dennett and Dawkins referred to themselves as “brights”.
I wonder if you thought most or all of the summer camps in the US were bible camps. ? I worked at a summer camp one summer, run by Jews, free of religious anything. Sports, crafts, farming, not enough science maybe? Tolerance, empathy, etc. It was fun. Is that supposed to be a rare sort of camp?
How I wish there was something like this where we live! My son is acutely aware of the lack of freethinkers among his peers. During the summer they all herd off to vacation bible schools and there is no camp for him. The Camp Quest site was encouraging though the nearest camp is nearly 1000 miles away!
UK and US has clearly eroded their sience people so they have to rely on immegrants that are not influenced by religion and are real scientists.
These camps will help to revert back the science drain and lessen the number of conspiracy theorists that are florishing now.
At least the summer camp where I worked relied heavily on European-imported counselors on a temporary work visa – they had a place to stay and be able to take trips and see the US. Most of them were from England, but some were from Scotland, Ireland, and Norway, that I remember. As I said before, a normal summer camp which still exists, not a bible camp. I really feel like this article presupposes the only camps that really exist are bible camps, so this is something new. We didn’t do the unicorn thing, but we spent two days doing some really intensive stuff for Amnesty International (one day awareness activities and another day, fundraising and raffling off crafts) and other world organizations. We spent another whole day pretending we were inside the story of Alice in Wonderland. I was the 5 of <3s, didn't score a major role. This was the summer of 1989.
I live in the Bible Belt, and I can tell you that there isn’t a Summer Camp within a few hundred miles of me that isn’t run by religious people who think it’s their mission in life to “spread the gospel”. Virtually every activity my child can participate in is run by one religious group or another.
I sent my child to play soccer on a city league and the coach shows up with a T-shirt on that says “I live for Jesus”. I had to tell him that my daughter would not be participating in any prayers after he got them together for a huddle after their first practice for that purpose. Pissed me off that the half-wit just assumed everyone shares his fantasies. When I told him that, his face turned beet red and he just stood there, dumbfounded.
I’d love to see one of these camps in every state. It would be just wonderful.
Launched? Camp Quest was founded in 1996.
Semantics, shemantics.
Talk about splitting hairs….
An atheist camp? Sounds like a Seinfeld episode, you know the show about nothing? lol, j/k guys.
But the kids in attendance aren’t even Atheists. Kids, by nature retain their sense of divine imagination and wonder and sensitivity since they are fresh from the unseen realm, fresh from God. At least until they “grow up”, become cynical and bow to the gods of reason and logic at which point the light goes out. But if we’re graced, if we’re fortunate we never grow beyond Love, beyond hope, beyond Him.
We dont need a religious camp or an atheist camp, but rather a Life camp where Love is the one thing they see, they experience and learn to give away. Love is the One thing.
Are you suggesting that babies are born believing in a specific god?
No, there is only One true, living God and He is Spirit. They just came from His great heart, that’s why they are so like Him, innocent, pure and why he identifies Himself with them, He the humble, childlike King. It’s not that they have to try and believe, its natural. Our adult unbelief is a learned and influenced trait tied to “thinking” with that aspect of our being that separated us from Him in the beginning. There is no dis-belief in children, they are love as He is love and are part and parcel of the Whole and we are whole in Him, in Love.
Apollo, Zeus, Ra, Vishnu, Ba’al, Zarathushtra, Kuan Yin, Quetzalcoatl, Bahá’u'lláh… impostors all! There is only one true god. The one babies are like before they get brainwashed, poor souls.
So your saying your god is gullible and easily tricked, like a small child?
“Kids, by nature retain their sense of divine imagination…”
Imagination? Yes. A “divine imagination”? No.
In any event, the common denominator is *imagination*. I see your point.
HAHA! I’ve found most of your comments curiously idiotic, but this one takes the cake! I thought I was going to wet myself I laughed so hard. Ahh, John. You’re a silly fella.
My daughter is quite capable of imagining a unicorn. Is this proof that unicorns exist?
Also, why isn’t it “an unicorn”?
I think because it’s pronounced yoonicorn and not oonicorn? The a/an thing goes by vowel/consonant sounds, not vowel/consonant spelling :)
Also, just rambling about existence… there is no fundamental difference between the idea of a horse and the idea of a unicorn, it’s just that there is an object in reality that corresponds to the idea of a horse, but not to the idea of a unicorn. God does exist in the sense that there are ideas about God that exist. In this manner, Kant objected to Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, which relies on existence being more perfect than non-existence, and I think it is a fatal flaw. For something to be literally non-existent, in the predicate sense, no one could have even conceived of it. Everything exists. There is nothing that does not exist; if there were, it would exist. Existence is not a predicate.
Or: the ontological argument is an argument for the existence of an idea, not of a thing
John C.: Are you talking about the Christian God or something else entirely? I get the gist you are a Christian who uses deist argumentation. Are you one of those “All religions basically point to the same God” type believers?