Sunday School for Atheists [Excerpts]*

On Sunday mornings, most parents who don't believe in the Christian God,
or any god at all, are probably making brunch or cheering at their kids'
soccer game, or running errands or, with luck, sleeping in. Without
religion, there's no need for church, right?

Maybe. But some nonbelievers are beginning to think they might need
something for their children. "When you have kids," says Julie Willey, a
design engineer, "you start to notice that your co-workers or friends
have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to
lean on." So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she
has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into
their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo
Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.

The growing movement of institutions for kids in atheist families also
includes Camp Quest, a group of sleep-away summer camps in five states
plus Ontario, and the Carl Sagan Academy in Tampa, Fla., the country's
first Humanism-influenced public charter school, which opened with 55
kids in the fall of 2005. Bri Kneisley...sent her son Damian, 10, to
Camp Quest Ohio this past summer...

Kneisley, 26, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, says she
realized Damian needed to learn about secularism after a neighbor showed
him the Bible. "Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was
telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared," says Kneisley.
In most ways a traditional sleep-away camp--her son loved canoeing--Camp
Quest also taught Damian critical thinking, world religions and tales of
famous freethinkers (an umbrella term for atheists, agnostics and other
rationalists) like the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2c9171%2c1686828%2c00.html