Atheism Camp: Heathens Score Own Goal With Monumentally Lame Idea

From the Sunday Times, a report that that Britain's first kids 'Atheism Camp' will be held in Somerset this summer.

"The five-day retreat is being subsidised by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, and is intended to provide an alternative to faith-based summer camps normally run by the Scouts and Christian groups...Dawkins said it was designed to "encourage children to think for themselves"...instead of singing Kum-bi-ya, they will sit around the embers belting out 'Imagine there's no heaven...and no religion too"...there will also be a £10 prize for the child who can prove the existence of the mythical unicorn."

Ugh. Apart from sounding like the wackest 'holiday' ever, this project just seems like a major own-goal for Dawkins and his disciples. Critics of hardcore atheists often accuse them of essentially making a religion of atheism itself, pointing to the inherent hypocrisy of demanding that people reject the dogma of religion while insisting on the primacy of their personal credo. Rational sceptics typically respond that rational skepticism does not represent a point of view, it suggests a method for arriving at one - atheism is the position arrived at at on the issue of religion having followed that method.

For a number of reasons, the foundation of an 'Atheism Camp' can only serve to undermine the credibility of the Dawkinite claim on a genuine 'think for yourself' policy. For starters - you've founded a camp. A space where children are sent by parents to have their children sold on a particular way of looking at the world. How can a situation where kids are removed from society for a period of time and gathered together to be told there's a right way of engaging with the world and a wrong way of engaging with that world not damage a legitimate culture of free-thinking? And the idea is so cute. Like the Atheist Campaign's 'There's probably no God' posters, the Atheist Camp concept is sort of based on a pun, like - 'Hey. Christian kids get sent to God Camp and sold on God. So get this - we're gonna run an Atheism Camp and sell kids Atheism. And instead of Kum-bi-ya, they're gonna sing Imagine.' The whole thing is bunk. It's self-defeating and disingenuous. Finally, kids are gonna resent being sent to this dork academy just as much as they would any faith camp you could send 'em to. They're gonna leave and run straight into the arms of Jesus.