I’ve had lots of things going on, so summer continues to be a relatively computer free zone for me, but I do plan on picking up the pace again come fall. In the meantime, here is a hilarious story about an atheist summer camp in Minnesota, where kids of militant atheist parents are subjected to lectures from local ACLU officials (among other people) before getting to the hot dogs and smores.
There’s a free registration required to view the whole story, but here’s a sample:
Being atheist means dodging Bible study and prayer meetings, but that doesn’t mean the born-just-once campers didn’t get their own dose of spinach. At Camp Quest, they had to attend lectures on topics like critical thinking, game theory, overpopulation and ethics.
At one point, a group of atheist adolescents gathered around Jerry Rauser, a board member of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. He came to talk about the separation of church and state.
On a wooden deck surrounded by rustling birch trees, Rauser set up a flip chart. On one page, he had drawn stick figures representing people living in a society where conflict between the state-sponsored church and competing religions led to “wars, bloodshed, persecution and prison.” The stick figures had frowns on their faces.
The next page showed the situation when there is a wall of separation between government and religion.
“Here’s the free thinker,” Rauser said, pointing to one of the stick figures. “He has a nice smile on his face, because he can ignore the church if he wants to. So there is freedom of religion and freedom from religion.”
More pages got flipped over as Rauser went on to ask the campers whether posting the Ten Commandments in a public school or having prayers at graduation violates the separation of church and state.
“Here’s a sticky one: the pledge of allegiance,” he said. “This is a big problem, because this is wrapped up in an expression of patriotism.”
Some fidgety campers weren’t exactly riveted.
“It’s like school,” Michael said afterward.
“I lost it after a few pages,” his brother Joseph said. “There was, like, a hundred there.”
But he does believe in the separation of church and state.
“I don’t like it when kids come to school with a cross necklace,” he said. “I think you have enough time in church to celebrate Jesus. I don’t think you need to bring it into the classroom.”
During the lecture on evolution, Berkshire argued against the theory of intelligent design by noting that humans have a blind spot in their eyes. “If we were going to design our eye, we wouldn’t have that.”
“The squid eye is developed better than ours,” said Rich Sinda, another counselor. “Either the real God is a squid god or they like them better than us.”
During a lecture designed to debunk astrology, the campers still were interested in how many stars the newspaper horoscope gave them that day.
“We’ve just discovered that these things are no more accurate than throwing a dart, and you still want to know how many stars you have?” said Berkshire, whose Minnesota license plates say “ATHEIST.”
The campers also were told that an invisible dragon lived at the camp. If any camper could prove the dragon didn’t exist, he or she would win a godless $20 bill. That’s a piece of currency printed before Congress ordered that money say “In God We Trust” — “religious graffiti” in the words of one atheist.
Berkshire said the kids quickly made a connection between belief in God and belief in invisible dragons.
“You can’t disprove a dragon, and you can’t disprove God’s existence,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that the dragon or God exists.”
If this is the best these atheistic evangelists can muster, I am not too worried about a godless revival breaking out. A blind spot in our eye is evidence against a creator? Invisible dragons are the equivalent of God? With such shallow, unthought-out assertions, I assume that these kids will do the same as many of their equally religious peers (yes, atheism is just as much of a religion as any other) – give up the faith of their parents, at least for a time, and search for the truth on their own. One can only hope they decide on the one worldview that actually has some good evidence and sound arguments to support it – Christianity.