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. 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.
That's just saying what they don't believe in. 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.