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Challenges to Campers, Camp Quest 2000
Edwin Kagin, Camp Quest Director
To the Campers of Camp Quest 2000, Greetings.
As campers from past years know, and as new campers are now to
learn, it is traditional at Camp Quest for your beloved Camp Director to each
year provide you with certain "Challenges" and invite you to provide answers to
them on the final night of camp.
We are pleased to report that the space ship
you assisted with your advice at Camp Quest '97 is still traveling safely on its
3 year, 80 day journey to the newly discovered planet Questerion. The S.S. Quest
should arrive safely on Questerion on November 26, 2000. We hope that the
communications problems have been fully solved and that we can have a report
from the ship by the time of Camp Quest 2001.
At Camp Quest ’98, you provided valuable
information to people of an unknown world, through a warp in space and time,
that encouraged them to develop their civilization alone paths of rational
inquiry and science rather than in a much different manner based on faith and
revealed supernatural truths. We believe that these people are actually from the
planet Questerion upon which the S.S. Quest will shortly land.
We have learned of new problems on this
planet, whose people you advised to find truth in facts rather than in faith.
The people took your advice, and they chose to make their laws and their
decisions based on what is good for people rather than on what the religious
leaders wanted them to do. This has made the religious leaders angry, and the
religious leaders have gotten laws passed that make it okay for religious people
to discriminate against other people who don’t agree with their superstitions.
They now want their religious beliefs to be made the laws that everyone on the
planet must obey.
The same people you advised have again asked
for advice. Remember, they can only understand ideas that are presented to them
by analogies, and through symbolism and myth--that is, through stories, art,
drama, music, poetry, dance, and other forms of creative symbolic expression.
Please provide answers, in a creative form of presentation, to each of the
following six questions. One question has been assigned to each cabin. Responses
to each question should be no longer than fifteen minutes. Good luck.
The future of a world is in your hands.
CABIN #1: Is there an invisible world
with angels and demons that can help or harm us?
CABIN #2: When people die, are they
punished in an afterlife for the "sins" of this life?
CABIN #3: Is there one book that tells
us everything important we ever need to know, including how to be good people?
CABIN #4: Did a supernatural being or
spirit make the universe and everything in it, and our planet, and all life on
it, including humans, about six to ten thousand years ago?
CABIN #5: If people don’t have absolute
religious rules, that tell them exactly what is right and what is wrong, won’t
people be able to do just anything they want to do?
CABIN #6: Is it okay for the law to
give people who have religious beliefs more rights than people who do not have
religious beliefs?
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