Will Atheism Remain as America's Default Religion?

Timothy Birdnow

America's support for atheism in the schools is up for review and may be overturned.

the Federalist article:

Today the U.S. Supreme Court hears a case that could determine whether parents and taxpayers have any choices about the kind of religion American children are taught with taxpayer funds. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenueconcerns whether private donations may support schools that make their religious beliefs explicit. It could also undo a century of U.S. court and legislative decisions that used animus between Protestants and Catholics to attack the faith of both kinds of Christians’ children over the last century.

Five years ago, Montana’s legislature enacted a tiny school choice program that allows residents to deduct up to $150 on state taxes for their donations to private school scholarships. Eighteen states offersimilar charitable opportunities, which fund private schools using private money. Montana’s taxation agency, however, banned religious schools from accessing these private donations, on the grounds that would violate the state constitution’s ban on using public funds for "sectarian” schools.

Since these school choice programs employ private funds, instead of direct taxpayer support such as through vouchers, they have been less successfully challenged in courts on the grounds Montana’s bureaucracy employed. Thirty-seven states includesome variation of this prohibition in their constitutions, and several run programs similar to Montana’s, often with courts’ approval. Now the Supreme Court will deal with the discrepancy.

It is expected to use the occasion to consider anti-religious constitutional provisions like Montana’s, known as Blaine amendments, after the 19th century politician James Blaine. During Blaine’s crusade to enact these policies, the word "sectarian” was understood to mean specifically "Roman Catholic.”

High time. Our schools and educational system has promoted secular humanism and atheism at the expense of the majority of religious beliefs of our society. That includes Catholic and Protestant Christians, but also Jews.

The article makes that case quite plain:

During the height of Catholic immigration to the United States, however, many Protestants didn’t want to allow Catholics equal access to local public funding for the schools their churches ran. They thus created barriers to public support for religious schooling, such as Blaine Amendments, that at first affected only Catholics, but eventually also turned on Protestants.

These barriers and others lawmakers and courts added ultimately drove Christianity from publicly supported U.S. K-12 education. They helped lay the legal and cultural groundwork for eventually substituting atheism for Christianity as the religion of U.S. schooling. It’s a sneaky move, because atheism and secularism are easier to falsely view as "neutral,” when they are in fact a competing religious understanding of the ultimate questions every faith seeks to answer.

The truth is that there is no neutrality about religion. To not believe in God is a religous belief, just as believing in God is a religious belief. To include the Bible in curricula is a religious decision, just like not including the Bible in curricula is a religious decision.

To pray or not to pray: both are religious questions. Both teach something about the importance, existence, and nature of religion, as does every other decision about a school’s instruction, teaching methods, and priorities. Instruction techniques must change based on whether one holds the religious view that humans are by nature sinful or the competing religious view that humans are born perfect and corrupted by institutions.

Yet for a century or more, we’ve accepted the dangerous fiction that it is possible for law and public institutions to be neutral on religious questions. This has had the effect of making secular atheism the dominant religion of American public life, all while pretending it wasn’t happening.

On that basis, in 1962 the Supreme Court heldthat the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” required U.S. public schools to ban prayer. In 1962, the court banned public schools from Bible readings as part of instruction. In 1971, it banned states from funding nonreligious instruction in private religious schools. In 1985, it banned schools from allowing one minute for silent prayer or meditation, and in 2000 banned students from voluntarily leading prayers at football games.

While the Supreme Court repeatedly took a sledgehammer to American Christians’ ability to pass on their faith using their own tax dollars and supposedly locally controlled institutions, our politicians have refused to redress the bigotry against religion this entails. For if it is bigotry for Protestants to have banned Roman Catholics from equal access to public education funds solely on account of their religion, it is also bigotry for atheists to have effectively banned Protestants and Catholics from equal access to public education funds solely on account of their religion.

And so SCOTUS is taking this up. Goes to show how important the balance of power has been on the Court.

Now, it is not the job of secular public schools to promote religion or religious belief, but it is supposed to support the efforts of the parents to educate their children AS THEY SEE FIT. As of now it is educating them in opposition to the wishes of the parents. It has, in fact, become a tool of propaganda for the State.

Anyone wonder why so many Millenials are so big on Socialism? They have no other religion. Man is a religious animal; we need to believe in something larger than ourselves. We know we are flawed and seek some sort of redemption. The modern school system is supplying a diabolical answer to our religious vacuum; socialism and world government.

Socialism expunges our sins. It says Man IS flawed, and by his choice of a selfish capitalistic system. Socialism is the way we buy out our sins. Support collectivism and you are a moral being again.

Environmentalism is much the same. You can buy indulgences via carbon credits, for instance. And there is a doomsday prophecy, and a slim chance at salvation.

Young people buy into Global Warming almost as to a man.

That's because the schools have taught them this. These are religious views. Our young people are riddled with guilt at being born into a rich society, and living well. They feel they are evil for not being poor and barbaric. They seek a naturalistic paradise that can only be attained if they eliminate most people on Earth and end industrial civilization. These are all religious beliefs, not intellectual concepts.

This is the triumph of irrationalism.

Until we change this int he schools we will see our society continue to slide into the toilet. ++_

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 05:24 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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