NS,
But it approaches it with an assumption that religious thinking is rational, which despite some attempts on here, isn't universal in religious thought.
Personally I'd prefer it to be called "rational camp" or some such rather than "atheist camp" specifically, but the principle is the same. I don't see it as approaching religious beliefs as if they're rational at all - that's rather the point! What it does though is to equip children with the tools to engage when the religious
do attempt rational arguments for their beliefs (Hope and his beloved NPF for example).
Once they have that it doesn't matter much whether the content of the claim is religious or something else - bad thinking is bad thinking regardless of the conclusions it leads to.
There is an odd connection that I have previously discussed here with wigginhall through the development of a more sola scriptura strand of Christianity at the Reformation to the rationality of the Enlightenment to an attempt by some to move religion onto an evidenced based approach.
As you're fond of telling us, trying to use naturalistic methods like reason to demonstrate non-natural conjectures like "God" is a fool's errand from the get-go though. That the religious have nothing else in their locker to distinguish their claims from just guessing isn't I think a problem for the rationalist.
I sometimes think when reading the posts of Hope where he talks about different perspectives that he is still stuck in the idea of equivalence in the method. He misuses the term evidence in a way that calls out for a method that looks at facts in the same way as the naturalistic methods but his whole position is that this is some kind of different claim. In some way there is an idea that just as say you and I 'experience' the number 22 bus, Hope and, I would say Vlad as well from his comments, 'experience' something they call God.
Quite. And that leads us back to the problem of finding ten people before breakfast who each think they've experienced completely different "somethings" just as sincerely, genuinely etc as Hope and Vlad think they've experienced their "God(s)". Why any one of them would think we should take any one "experience" claim more seriously than any other such claim is unknowable, but there is it is nonetheless.
They also seem to think that in talking about that experience with others, despite the paucity of the language that you or I see, that there is a common validation of the experience not being unique.
Memetics - start with an idea, spread it, build on it, reinforce the positive feedback and eventually the opinion becomes a cult becomes a religion. That so many deistic narratives are culturally determined tells us that, or at least implies it strongly.
Given that I think that Hope has a point in saying that there are two different perspectives, but fails to actually realise that the different perspective he has needs to be talked about in a different way rather than go down this trope of evidence that the dog ate.
Two or two million different perspectives - doesn't matter much for this purpose. There's the common perspective of inter-subjective experience underpinned by reason such that almost everyone will take the lift rather than jump out of the window, and then there's - well - the anything goes free-for-all of "I really think I experienced X, therefore X is real" of which Hope, Vlad
et al provide sub-sets.
Vlad even went so far as to assert that desiring a relationship with something "points to" that something being real, though despite countless times of asking he's steadfastly avoided telling us what connection he thinks there to be between the two.
