If Almost 1/4 of US States Can Now Fund Creationism...
[below: excerpt from Vouchers/Tax Credits Funding Creationism, Revisionist History, Hostility Toward Other Religions]On young-demographic big social media sites such as Reddit.com I read a great deal of sentiment to the effect that atheism, as movement, is winning and will inevitably prevail. Often, reasons given center around the alleged decline of Christianity in the US and other nations, and a supposed corresponding rise in secularism. Without getting into the numbers game (fewer Christians? More atheists?) I'd like to point out that energized and organized minorities can very effectively organize for political power. One trend that radically bucks the claim that atheism is prevailing is a disturbing (for supporters of church-state separation) trend in which more and more federal and state money flows, each year, to religious entities in America. Outrage over this phenomenon breaks out sporadically, with Kentucky's tax-credit supported Noah's Ark theme part as the latest provocation du jour but rarely do people so outraged back up, to survey the wider pattern in which more and more government tax dollars flow to the "faith based" sector. The trend really took off with George W. Bush's Faith Based Initiative, which diverted several billion dollars to religious groups during the Bush years but the flow hasn't stopped, and as independent journalist Andy Kopsa has chronicled, FBI money has recently gone to virulently bigoted, antigay organizations such as the Iowa Family Policy Center, which has claimed that homosexuality poses a great threat to public health than secondhand smoke. In the end, it really doesn't matter if the politicized Christian right amounts to only a |