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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Camp Quest - Day One

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/28/atheist-camp-quest

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The media seems to have decided that yesterday – the first day of the "atheist summer camp" Camp Quest, which convenes for a week of Darwin-themed godless fun in Somerset – was important. Important enough to run it as an item on BBC news this morning. Important enough for the Guardian to ask me for a comment about it. Why? There is surely little that is remarkable about 24 happy campers gathering for a week to canoe, zip line and sing campfire songs. Does it lie in the novelty of the fact that Camp Quest is specifically designed for "the children of atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view" (though, presumably to head off discrimination suits, it is technically open to the offspring of parents of any belief)? That the camp will have an evolution theme, and feature some "pseudo-science" debunking and a competition to disprove the existence of unicorns? Of course this was it, which is why most of the stories packaged the camp as "Richard Dawkins' Atheist Camp", name-checking the bestselling God-basher, even though the extent of his involvement was to offer a modest one-off donation.
This allows the non-hysterical "quality" media to have their liberal cake and eat their Daily Mail cake too. Underlying the apparently objective coverage of the camp is a distinct line in sneeriness and a barely concealed incitement to apoplexy – look! They seem to say, see how these heathen are brainwashing their children, just like the religious fundamentalists they criticise! Michael Deacon in the Telegraph, for example, worried about "the thought of my child mutating into some kind of pedantic, humourless, eight-year-old mini-Dawkins". It's all a bit predictable really, though of course great publicity for the camp, which promptly sold out.
My problems with Camp Quest are of a different order. Firstly – summer camp? In my experience summer camp serves as a decent backdrop to North American coming-of-age-teen-flicks like Meatballs or the killing ground for a bunch of hormonal witless teens like Camp Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th and … that's it. We don't do summer camps in Britain, do we? I always understood them to be a distinct phenomena of the American system that confers a wonderfully prolonged summer vacation on its lucky little Brad and Janets, while shackling its working schlubs to their desks for all but a couple of weeks a year. Summer camp is a practical childcare solution. We Brits had to acquire our canoeing and coming-of-age skills on school trips, or round the back of the bike sheds. And didn't we also spend a bit of time with Mum and Dad? I'm sure the idea of packing the kids off to camp for a week appeals to a certain kind of parent in this country – I mean how is one supposed to keep them occupied when they come back from boarding school?
Secondly, Camp Quest is an organisation set up as a mirror and counterbalance to religious summer camps, which are apparently all the rage in the states. But are they a phenomenon that requires counteracting here? I know they exist, but so do Viking battle reconstruction clubs and step classes. I thought the British way was to ignore these idiosyncratic outbursts of nonsense, not set up counter-nonsense clubs. The issue of to what degree we non-believers should seek to inculcate our non-belief in our children is certainly a live one, as evidenced by the hundreds of responses to this article by an atheist parent trying to find books for his kids to counteract the Bible classes their Catholic mother takes them to. As with most things the humanists can't seem to agree. Some of them endorse the idea of humanist camps and books as a counterweight to scripture, others suggest reading the Bible and arguing loudly with it. Some people even think the answer is to love the kids, and trust them to make up their own minds.
I think that if we have to have summer camps then an atheist summer camp dedicated to Darwin is entirely welcome.
But do we really have to?



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