The Reason Stick: Atheist Summer Camps?

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Atheist Summer Camps?

Following this article in last weeks Sunday Times about Camp Quest, I was asked by the BBC World Service to talk about my reasons for wanting to send my children to the camp. As the Sunday Times article contained a number of inaccuracies regarding Richard Dawkins' involvement and unfairly portrayed a rather militant atheist camp, the Director of Camp Quest UK and myself where keen to talk to the BBC to try and redress the balance.

The audio file below is an extract from the BBC World Service news on Monday morning and features the Director of Camp Quest UK, Samantha Stein, and myself talking about the upcoming summer camp.

As I am a rather pedantic old fart, I also wrote a letter to the Sunday Times to highlight some of the inaccuracies and emphasise what I hoped my children would gain from the experience. In the unlikely event that it is published I will add a link, otherwise I’ll stick it in a future blog post. In the meantime here are a few more links:

The Guardian
Derren Brown’s Blog
The Independent
My Previous Blog Post

1 comment:

Paul S. Jenkins said...: I listened to the clip - well done for sounding reasonable in the face of journalistic efforts to portray the camp as some kind of atheist military academy.

The more attention drawn to the de facto privilege afforded to anything to do with faith, the better. And although we risk being seen as obsessed with it ("why are atheists always going on about religion?") it's a message that must be rammed repeatedly home, because many, many people don't see religion's free pass (if they see it at all) as any kind of a problem.; 30 June 2009 at 22:46