Now It's Atheist Summer Camp

Thank goodness for professional atheist Richard Dawkins. Like God, if he didn't exist we'd have to invent him.

According to Michael Deacon, Dawkins is helping inaugurate a kids' summer camp. For atheists.

Professor Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, is helping to launch Britain's first summer camp for young atheists. At Camp Quest UK, children aged eight to 17 will be given lessons in evolution and rational scepticism.

As if. As if children aged eight to 17 are not already getting lessons in evolution and rational skepticism 24-7 from their government schools, from the liberal media, from the hedonistic culture!

Actually, more fun than the article are the comments, a slug-fest between folks stuck in the Reformation and folks stuck in the French Revolution.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But what the atheists miss, I suspect, is that the idea of summer Bible camp that they want to compete with is to get kids out of the me-me-me culture of daily life and think a little about the higher things.

As Charles Taylor, the center-left Catholic philosopher might say: There seems to be a universal human need for something other than ordinary human flourishing. You can call that something the Higher Things, God, Genuine Democracy, Peace and Justice, the Non-dual, or even the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

But I'd say that there is something to life other than evolution and rational skepticism.

The problem is that the "something other" presents itself as an irreducible mystery, a riddle wrapped in an enigma. And so people tend to argue about it.