cquest

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

National Camp Quest: A Home Away from Home for Humanists by Eric Katz On the horizon, there is a small bright light, hanging in the air like a star. I tell the kids it is Venus, but my conscience troubles me; it looks more orange than green. I am not troubled long, however, before one of the campers asks,"Does Venus have moons?" Pensive, I reply abstractly in the negative.

"Oh," says the child, "then what are these?" I look in the telescope, and there, on either side of the now enlarged orange light (I knew it was the wrong color) are three tiny pinpricks in the velvet sky. They are moons, and their planet is Jupiter. The children are delighted and vindicated.

At any other camp, there would probably be no astronomy. But here, we have spent the whole day discussing the heliocentric theory of the solar system and why we accept it. What else can we do that evening but grant dispensation at bed-time to use the camp's telescope?

At any other camp, the counselor's word is law. Here, the law can be questioned. In fact, we had a cabin-cleaning strike four days later. They demanded pizza and soda. And how did the staff handle it? Did we cry and curse and threaten to tell their parents? No. We called on them to elect cabin-representatives, and we taught them about unions by implementing classic strike-breaking strategies: we made a counter-offer of pizza for the two best cabins only.

So where is this camp? California? New York? Surpisingly, it is in Ohio, near the Kentucky border. Camp Quest is a one-week summer-haven for the rascally offspring of atheists, humanists and other free-thinking heathens. Surrounded on all sides by the religious right, Camp Quest teaches children to ward off superstition with the gentle light of reason.

At the beginning of every session, Edwin Kagin explains to the campers that there are two invisible pink unicorns on the site, and he promises a one-hundred dollar prize to the first child who can prove that it does not exist. The youngest beat their brains out trying to prove their case, and rail against Edwin for his silly beliefs. But as the children grow older, a wonderful thing happens. They figure out the game that Edwin has been playing all along.

Yes there are no unicorns, and he does not believe that there are. More importantly, however, they learn that the game was stacked against them from the beginning. You cannot prove conclusively that something does not exist. From the moment they learn this simple fact, they begin to help the younger campers to think and to reason. And armed with this profound conclusion, they begin to understand the insane world that we humans have built for ourselves.

The campers of Camp Quest gain all of this every year, and more. Most of these children have been facing the insanity of the world without understanding it, and they have been facing it without help. It is very hard to be the only atheist in a small southern town. More valuable than any single lesson we can teach them is the knowledge that it is OK to ask challenging questions. It is OK not to believe in God. The campers of Camp Quest arrive hungry to learn how to think, and they leave knowing they are not alone.