A Different Kind of Summer Camp

Hello Muddah. Hello Faddah.

It’s summer and all across America and around the world kids are attending summer camp. They are playing ball, swimming, hiking, canoeing, and sitting around campfires singing silly songs. It’s all great fun for the younger set.

And most of them are also engaging in other mandatory activities that may or may not be so fun. They are praying and listening to their camp counselors spew forth religious propaganda. Yes, most summer camps in the U.S. are sponsored by churches or other religious organizations, like the Boy Scouts.

Most Boy Scout camps are not as aggressive about promoting religion as church camps are, but the Boy Scouts of America still forces its members to sign a Declaration of Religious Belief.

I was a Boy Scout when I was about 12. While in my early and mid 20s, I was also a scout leader. It was fun. We hiked and camped and had other social activities. But at no time did we pray as a troop or otherwise engage in religious worship. We all recited the oath, pledging to give service to God and our country. But nobody really thought much about it. I went to church back then, too. And I really didn’t consider what the meaning of the pledge to serve God was about; it was just a phrase. It was just something we recited as scouts.

The summer following my college graduation I worked as an assistant program director for a summer camp sponsored by the Indianapolis Boys Club. The Boys Club has a secular mission statement. Yet every Sunday during camp the camp staff took turns being preachers. We held a church service in our shelter house. And all the boys had to attend.

I was always uneasy about hosting mandatory church services. When it was my turn to be the preacher of the week I spoke on ways of controlling anger. I didn’t mention God at all. Even though I was raised a Christian, I felt it was inappropriate to force the campers to sit through a Christian church service when some of them might not have been Christian.

I wanted to attend summer camp when I was a kid, but I never got to. A close friend of mine and I begged our parents to send us to a summer camp sponsored by our church. But my friend’s dad said it cost too much. So we settled for taking turns spending the night at each other’s houses or pitching a tent in the back yard.

Church camps and bible camps are just another way for Christian evangelicals to assimilate young people. Although there are fun activities going on, the main purpose of the camps is to solidify a child’s relationship with the church.

But there is at least one organization that is starting to intrude into the dominance of bible-oriented summer camps in America and in the UK. Camp Quest was begun in 1996 in Ohio. It now operates six summer camps in the U.S. and Canada. And this year it is sponsoring a humanist summer camp in Great Britain.

According to its Web site, Camp Quest’s purpose is “to provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech, and the separation of religion and government guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”

It does not indoctrinate people into atheism. It welcomes all young people regardless of their religious persuasion. But it does cater to those who hold to a naturalistic, not a supernatural world view. It stresses scientific inquiry over supernatural explanations of the world.

The Center for Inquiry also offers a summer camp. It is taking place currently in Holland, New York. Called Camp Inquiry, its purpose is to foster scientific inquiry in children and to allow them to discover for themselves that myths of all kinds do not hold up to rational scrutiny.

These alternatives to church-sponsored summer camps also teach kids about ethics and morality. They teach them to be upstanding citizens who respect the rights and beliefs of others. Yet they are still far outnumbered by the summer camps that indoctrinate kids into the religious world, which is too often dominated by bigotry, judgment, shortsightedness, and the hampering of scientific thought.

What we need in this country are more institutions like those sponsored by the Center for Inquiry or Camp Quest. Those who donate to good causes might want to consider adding a secular summer camp to their list of charities.

Miracles Made Me Agnostic

According to the bible, Jesus performed many miracles during his ministry. He is said to have walked on water, healed lepers, restored the sight of the blind, calmed a storm, expelled demons, and most miraculous of all, brought his friend Lazarus back from the dead.

Some of these miracles were performed using nothing but hand gestures, such as when he calmed the storm; others required the use of props, such as when he restored the sight of a blind man by spitting on dirt and then rubbing it on the blind man’s eyes. And it isn’t quite clear why Jesus didn’t just heal his friend Lazarus before he died. He knew Lazarus was sick and he mourned his death. He even wept. Was it all just theatrics to prove to his followers he could do it?

The Old Testament has its share of miraculous stories, too. With no miracles in play, how could Jonah have survived for three days in the belly of a fish? How could Noah have built a boat big enough for a pair of every animal on Earth and how could he have then rounded up all these animals, especially the ones living in Antarctica and in the Arctic?

As a child, I didn’t have much trouble believing these bible stories. But then as I matured, reality set in. I knew that not every story in the bible was literally true. How could it be? But I figured that Jesus’ miracles must be true. They were related in the New Testament and more directly concerned my eternal soul.

But it seemed to me that the demon stories probably were about epileptics. And the stories about his walking on water and calming storms were probably the result of writer embellishments. Still, I thought I had to believe them in order to be a good Christian, so I told myself they must be true.

Then, one bright Sunday morning the pastor of my church, in his sermon, cleared it all up for me, at least momentarily. He said it was not really necessary to believe all the bible stories in order to be saved. He said it was ok not to believe the story of Creation in Genesis or the stories about Jonah and Noah. He even said it wasn’t necessary to believe any of the Jesus miracles except one: The Resurrection. He said that Jesus died for our sins and that we needed to believe he was resurrected and ascended into Heaven. Publicly accepting that Jesus is the Savior, plus being baptized, is all it takes to assure oneself of everlasting life with God. Believing all that other stuff is optional.

So there it was, my way out of my dilemma. I didn’t really have to believe that Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead or that he drove the demons out of the possessed. The stories of the bible that had me confused and doubtful no longer had to worry me. I just wouldn’t believe them. According to my pastor, I didn’t have to.

But then it hit me. And it didn’t take long. If a belief in Jesus’ miracles is optional, except for the biggie, the dying on the cross with subsequent resurrection, then why was that particular miracle necessary? Yes, I know it is the centerpiece of His legacy of our salvation. But if that miracle is true, then why stop there? Why shouldn’t all the others also be true? I mean, it’s in for a penny, in for a pound, right?

If I am going to believe in one miracle, then I must believe that miracles are possible. And if they are possible, then why not believe in all the lesser miracles related in the bible? So I was back to square one. If I had to believe in the Resurrection to have my soul saved, then I sort of had to believe in all the miraculous stories in the bible, including the Creation, Noah and his ark, Jonah inside the fish, ad infinitum.

But then I recognized the corollary to that scenario. If believing in the Resurrection sort of forced a belief in all the other biblical miracles then not believing in one or two miracles that I knew were impossible meant that I didn’t have to believe in any of them, including the Resurrection.

That led to years of confusion, because I really wanted to believe in the Resurrection. I wanted to have an eternal soul that would reside with God. But I also knew that the Creation story was a myth, and so were all the other Old Testament stories. I mean, most of them have been scientifically disproved beyond reasonable doubt. And even most biblical scholars believe that some of Jesus’ minor miracles, such as driving out demons, probably didn’t really take place.

So how was I supposed to reconcile my disbelief of most of the biblical miracles with the mandatory belief in the Resurrection? You see my dilemma?

But after much thought and consultation with those who were smarter than I with regard to the bible, I gradually came to understand something. It doesn’t matter what I want to believe. It doesn’t matter what I actually do believe. The only thing that matters in the end is what is actually true. Believing something or not believing does not change the truth.

I also learned something else. Nobody knows what the truth is with regard to the eternal soul, life after death, or our final destinies. Oh, there are lots of people who claim they know the truth, but their “truth” is based only on their beliefs. And, as I have come to realize, beliefs don’t matter. Belief does not equal fact.

So today, I am a proud agnostic. I stand with those who have also figured out that, no, you don’t really have to believe in something. Since nobody knows the ultimate truth, we are proud to acknowledge the fact that we don’t know either. We also know for sure what religious folks may never figure out, that they don’t know the truth either; they just don’t realize it yet.

GPS: It Knows Where You Are

The advancements in consumer technologies never cease to amaze me. Take the GPS devices for example. These little units have become commonplace over the past few years as their prices have become more affordable to the average American. But what they do, and how they do it, is nothing short of amazing.

Let’s take a quick look at how these little gadgets know exactly where you are and where you’re going.

GPS stands for Global Positioning System. The system relies on a series of satellites. There are 24 of them in operation at all times. They orbit the earth twice per day, circling 12,000 miles above Earth’s surface, each of them in a different orbital path.

Each satellite has on board an atomic clock, accurate down to billionths of a second, and all of the clocks have to be perfectly synchronized. Each GPS device has a quartz clock, which is far less accurate than an atomic clock, but the clock in the GPS unit is synchronized using signals from the orbiting satellites once every second. So you can say that the GPS device has a virtual atomic clock.

Your position is pinpointed using a process known as trilateration. It’s similar to how they determine the epicenter of an earthquake. By measuring the distance to the epicenter from three different locations, you can tell where the earthquake occurred. That’s because if you draw a circle around each seismograph station with the radius of the circle representing the distance to the quake, the circles will intersect at only one place. That’s the epicenter.

So a GPS needs to get signals from at least three different satellites. The distance to each is calculated based on the speed of light and the time it takes for the signal to travel between the satellite and the GPS. A sphere around each satellite with a radius of the distance between it and the GPS will intersect with each other at the exact location of the GPS unit.

The distances are updated once per second, so any movement of the GPS can be calculated. The position and motion of the GPS is then placed as an overlay on a road map. The computer chip inside the GPS makes all these calculations almost instantly.

So, to determine your exact location, the computer chip and software in the GPS has to take into consideration that the GPS is moving and every one of the satellites it is tracking is moving at high speed as they circle the earth. It has to synchronize its internal clock every second using calculations from three satellites. And then it has to place this computed location on a map so that the map moves to keep up with the motion of the GPS. It also then has to select the best routes, calculate your speed, and estimate your time of arrival at your destination.

In addition to all that, the clocks in the satellites have to be updated and synchronized with an earthbound master station to make sure that they are always synchronized with each other. This all has to be done taking into consideration the effects of the atmosphere on radio signals.

It all results in the computation of your location within about five feet of accuracy. How cool is that?