I have just read a friends blog about this article in the Guardian by Shazia Mirza http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/25/sharia-mirza-atheists. It's made me quite angry. I have to admit that I've never been a fan of hers. She's always come across as quite smug and self righteous. It's important for me to like the person I think the comedian is and she has never presented herself as particularly likeable to me. I saw her show in Edinburgh last year and it didn't go anyway to changing my mind about her. This is just my opinion however. It would be unfair of me to judge everything she does just by my initial impression of her. I have disliked people in the past only to do a complete U-turn and change my mind because I've have heard about something they've done or read something they've written. My point is, I don't dislike her for the sake of it. This article is just an example of the reasons that she is not my kind of person.
She has written about (amoungst other things) Camp Quest. To be fair to the Guardian they have placed a small paragraph before her article pointing out her mistakes. She claims that "Richard Dawkins has even set up a children's atheist summer camp". He hasn't. Camp Quest was started up in America, Dawkins had nothing to do with it. She also states that " These kids are aged eight to 15". They are not. The camp takes children ages 8 to 17. This point is very minor but it just shows the extent of research she has done into Camp Quest before writing the article. She's got some very basic and easily checked out facts wrong. The thing I find the most amazing is her describing Dawkins as "the Nick Griffin of atheism". I understand that Dawkins isn't to everyone's taste, it took me a while to come round to him but to compare him to Nick Griffin is outrageous. Check out the Camp Quest UK website here: http://www.camp-quest.org.uk/. They tell you on the website that they'd prefer not to be labelled as an 'Atheist Camp' as it's broader than that. From what I can tell its more a celebration of science than anything else.
I follow a few people on twitter who sent their children to Camp Quest this year and all of them, once their children were returned to them, were talking about how much fun their children had whilst there and were singing their praises. The children even got to meet and chat with A C Grayling. I wish that I was either A. young enough to go myself or B. had children to send. Also, her speculation that the children who attended Camp Quest would be jealous of the other children's stories of Disneyland is ridiculous. The camp hardly lasts the whole summer, from what I can tell the camp lasted little over a week, leaving plenty of time for the children to have some good old fashioned fun as well (but lets be honest, who wants to go to Blackpool anymore?).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment