Smugger Camp

[pyat]

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, Britain's most prominent atheist.

This is undoubtedly where Eustace Clarence Scrubb went to camp.

Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...and he almost deserved it.

Thank you; the title header alone sums up my reaction to this.

Fundamentalism is Fundamentalism: those believe that Only They possess the One True Truth all act the same, no matter what the details of their particular Truth might be.

[eggshellhammer.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that if you read the article, you'd see that, uh, this camp manages to not cover any particular ideology so much as a set of tools for evaluating them.

[relee.livejournal.com]

But, it's impossible to prove something doesn't exist, only that they do exist. Isn't that a logical trap? A TRAP FOR CHILDREN!?

[easyalchemy.livejournal.com]

It's because of Eustace that I know what assonance is!

That's Invisible PINK Unicorn, Buster!

[ankhorite.livejournal.com]

You've seen my icon?

You know my faith?

By Her Holy Hooves and Horn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn), study up! :)

Ours is a mixed mating. My dearest savant_da_rat is Pastafarian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster).

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

... you seem a little snider than the article justifies. I'm curious as to why.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Oh, the whole thing about "Kill a bit of imagination, and you get a prize!" bothers me. I certainly would not want to send anyone to a summer camp where they were forced to believe that unicorns are real, but I've always associated camping with places where you could pretend there were magical critters in the world.

The Salvation Army summer camp I went to was an advance scouting colony on a hostile alien planet. Also, I would sometimes image it as something. ;)

That all said, I'm the guy who told the minister who married us that James Randi was my biggest personal hero, which flummoxed him a bit.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

He's basically bribing children to overlook complex philosophical issues (see comment number two : P) for points against his dead dad on some ideological scorecard.

[jirris-midvale.livejournal.com]

I have this love/hate relation with dawkins. I find him eloquent, well spoken, taking a fight where there needs to be one, and at the same time I tend to preface talking about him with "he's kind of a fuck".

I think the promo is neat, however. I can get behind the idea of an athiest camp as well. Now, if they encourage rational thought and logic as an ends to dispell mumbo-jumbo and magical thinking, that's good if they are actually doing that. Somehow I think the end result is more people who get all uppity about the phrase 'under god'.

There is a very good (when it isn't a comercial for a videogame console) episode of South Park about Dawkins I found to be hilarious. Short version: the people of the future argued over which version of athiesim is the correct one, which lead to wars between humans and intelligent otters.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

"he's kind of a fuck".

The atheists need to choose a new Pope.

[kinra.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and it's too late to vote for Asimov.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Creating an "atheist" camp is moving further and further into the realm of "YES, FINE, OK, it really IS a religion."

Except that I blaspheme its tenets by saying so.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Theodore Roszak, please pick up the white courtesy phone.

[paka.livejournal.com]

1. My first experience with Dawkins was him talking about a community of Chasidic Jews in NYC. This sounded to me a lot like "ha ha, look at the backwards parochial Yids and the way they cling to their silly god and silly traditions while We, of course, know A Better Truth." I've heard that one before, certainly. Not to mention it read as "hey! Let's go gunning for the widely disliked ethnic minority!" It established Dawkins in my mind as pompously self assured, bigotted and just plain mean-spirited.

2. An atheist summer camp, in which children are taught Correct Beliefs and even participate in contests to disprove imagination and wonder, only further entrenches my impression of the man as pompously self assured, bigotted and just plain mean-spirited.

3. I believe that atheism as a philosophy can offer a lot of hope. The world is a bright and glorious place, ruled by no fearsome god, in which amazing and wonderful things may spring into being at any moment thanks to mechanics which make sense. However, this sure sounds like the opposite approach to atheism, in which we are told that the world is instead limited and petty and that we should take care to believe only what is of course rational. It's a very Victorian atheism indeed.