1 August 1998

OREGONIA, Ohio - At Camp Quest - where the motto is "It's Beyond Belief" and the camp song proclaim's "Reason's Our Way" - the discussion preceding the toasting of marshmallows for s'mores one hot and humid July evening focused on proving the nonexistence of unicorns.

Camp director Edwin Kagin, playing the foil, stubbornly insisted on their existence and challenged the more than 50 campers and counselors arrayed before him on wooden bleachers to prove him wrong through rational argument.

When a gaggle of Canada geese glided past overhead before landing on a nearby lake, Kagin declared it a sign he was speaking truth. When campers pressed him on how he could be sure unseen unicorns were real, his only defense was that it had been "revealed" to him.

Finally, 11-year-old camper Christine Warner blurted out, "You shouldn't be talking us into believing in unicorns because we know they're not real, and if you want to believe in them, keep it to yourself!"

The St. Louis girl's comment prompted laughter and applause from the other campers, as a self-satisfied smile spread across Kagin's face. His none-too-subtle point had been made: There's little to be gained in arguing with cocksure religious believers; just tell them to bug off.

Welcome to Camp Quest, lone counterweight to the thousands of religious summer camps run by Christians, Jews, Muslims and others.

Of the estimated 8,500 day and resident camps of all sorts operating across the country this summer, Camp Quest stands alone as the only one known to be operated by and for secular humanists, according to the American Camping Association.

It's goal is to provide the offspring of secular humanists with the gumption to articulate their disbelief in a nation where more than 90 percent of the people routinely tell pollsters they believe in God.

"We're trying to equip our kids to live in a world where not believing is the last taboo," said Kagin, 57, the son of a Presbyterian minister and an attorney from Union, Ky.

One such kid was Wesley Filardo, a bright 13 year old from Cincinnati who hopes to do computer design work for the first manned space flight to Mars - that's if he can't be one of the astronauts aboard.

"Religion is just complete fiction, but at home, I can only talk about that with my closest friends," said Filardo, who attended Camp Quest with his younger brother. "Even then it sometimes cause problems for me because my friends go to church. Here was a camp were I didn't have to hide my feelings."

Kagin and his wife, Helen, a retired anesthesiologist, began Camp Quest three years ago with some assistance from the Council for Secular Humanism, based in Amherst, N.Y.

"We're interested in helping parents who are not religious by helping their kids meet others from similar backgrounds," said Tim Madigan, editor of Free Inquiry, the council's quarterly magazine. "Camp Quest is a pilot project that we hope to expand."

In its first two years, Camp Quest operated out of rented space at a Baptist camp ground in northern Kentucky.

"The Baptists were pleasant enough to us, but their crosses and creationist literature convinced us it was not the best of fits," said Edwin Kagin.

This year, the camp moved to a 420-acre YMCA facility dotted with lakes and thick forest in the countryside some 35 miles northeast of Cincinnati. About 20 campers attended Camp Quest its first year. This summer, about 40 campers ages 8-13 from as far away as Texas and the Caribbean island of Curacao came together for one week in late July.

Despite the YMCA campers saying grace before meals in an adjoining dining room, Kagin said the move was for the better. "The YMCA doesn't push God in the same way those Baptists do," he said.

Camp Quest offered the usual camp fare; horseback riding, swimming, canoeing, soccer, artificial rock wall climbing, arts and crafts, field trips and the like. But whenever possible, the Kagins and the camp's other adult supervisors added a secular humanist twist to whatever was going on.

Secular humanism, explained Fred Edwords, executive director of the American Humanist Association and one of several adult volunteer leaders at Camp Quest this year, is a term that encompasses unabashed anti-religionists as well as agnostics and liberal religious believers attracted to groups such as the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Most secular humanists profess atheism. But just calling them atheists "is an injustice. That's just saying what they don't believe in. There's much that they do believe in," said Edwords, whose organization, also based in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst, N.Y., also supports Camp Quest.

Secular humanists reject the supernatural in any form and believe rational discourse and the scientific method are the only proper channels for discerning meaning and values.

They view humans as part of the natural world and a result of the evolutionary process. Religious beliefs, they hold, are a byproduct of human experience and culture - and are, in large part, responses to the fear of death and life's mysteries.

Politically, secular humanists tend to be liberals who support church-state separation and the tolerance of minority views, said Steven Schafersman, a geology professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and another Camp Quest adult volunteer.

"You will find secular humanists across the political spectrum, but most tend to gravitate toward liberalism because it encompasses compassion and practicalism - both secular humanist standards," he said.

Secular humanists also contend that far more Americans agree with their position then let on. Edwords calculates that as many as 11 million Americans may be secular humanists, although most simply lead fully secular lives without advertising their position.

"You don't talk about it much because it doesn't do you any good and it may do you harm," said Ken LeBlanc, a retired science teacher from Venice, Fla., who also helped out at this year's Camp Quest.

Together in the Ohio countryside, however, Camp Quest's secular humanists felt no such inhibitions.

Following every meal, for example, Edwords gave a brief talk about secular humanist "heroes and heroines" - among them the French philosopher Voltaire, William Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and even John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

"The kids need to know that some very substantial people who contributed mightily to society were secular humanists, or at least 'free thinkers' during their age," said Edwords. "They need to hear that we're not just fringe people and they're not just outsiders."

Likewise, nature walks led by Jim Strayer, a retired high school and community college biology teacher from Ormond Beach, Fla., turned into discourses in support of evolution. Schafersman did the same when he led a field trip to a nearby prehistoric Native American village site.

A magic show became an opportunity to debunk the supernatural. Art classes were a chance to draw parts of the human anatomy and discuss the ancient Greeks' exaltation of the human form.

A weeklong challenge for the campers was to create myths and symbols that a civilization trying to decide whether to live by science or faith might use to understand the world.

For the most part, though, such efforts appeared far less important to the campers as was the opportunity to just hang out with others from similar backgrounds.

"I think it's amazing that they never tell you in (public) school that some people don't believe in God," said 11-year-old Lindsay Joseph from Naperville, Ill., who attended Camp Quest with her younger brother and her mother and grandmother, who both served as adult volunteers.

"I always get the feeling in school they're telling you there is a God, but not on purpose. It gets awkward. You don't have to worry about that here," she said.

Hearing those sentiments, Adam Butler, 20, a University of Alabama-Birmingham computer science student, said he wished the likes of Camp Quest had been around when he was growing up in Pelham, Ala.

Butler caused something of a local fuss when he sought to organize a "free thought society" in his high school. Despite initial school opposition, he eventually succeeded. But Butler said he has yet to forget "feeling so different when everybody around you believes in God and thinks you're odd for not.

"I know how these kids must feel," said Butler, another Camp Quest adult aide. "It was frightening growing up an atheist in the Bible Belt, always looking over your shoulder and wondering when you're going to be threatened by the 'good Christian' kids from down the street."