Parents, does the overt (and sometimes covert) Christianity of many summer camps give you pause? Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, feels your pain. According to a report in the UK current affairs site First Post, The Richard Dawkins Foundation is funding an atheist summer camp, and it sounds rather fantastic:

Alongside the more traditional activities of tug-of-war, swimming and canoeing, children at the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational scepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution. Camp-goers aged eight to 17 will also be taught how to disprove phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy. In the Invisible Unicorn Challenge, any child who can prove that unicorns do not exist will win a £10 note - which features an image of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory—signed by Dawkins.

Wait, are we talking invisble unicorns or just plain unicorns? A challenge indeed.

Source: First Post

Image by  Steffe , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

As the divide between believer and nonbeliever grows larger, science has become a weapon used by both sides. An article from New Scientist cites the evolution of the human brain as evidence that the world’s religions are products of human imagination. Maurice Bloch, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, argues that belief in a divine being emerged between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, coinciding with the human capacity to imagine.

 —Morgan Winters