I am going to slightly disagree with your position. I don't see it as erosion at all but rather, for lack of a more appropriate word, "evolution" of the basic plague that is religiosity. The world is not much less religious than it ever has been IMO. The culture of academia, and in some instance politics, has simply invented mechanisms to temper the influence religion has upon them because of the practical failures it has wrought.
The marketplace of ideas is wholly capitalistic. Good ideas like good products may never gain traction because the measure is less driven by quality than it is by trend. Where you see erosion, I see ideas that failed because they were like defective products. Prohibition did not fail because people saw the absurdity of the religious ideal. Prohibition failed because it was entirely impractical given reality.
The problem I see with religious persistence is that the current targets become much more abstract the more real life practicalities force religious influence out of the basic conversation. This is no longer a fight to keep religion out of public schools or public office. It is a fight to religion out of the basic definition of empiricism that underlies anything useful that we do. My fear is that this new strategy will not fail enough to go the way Prohibition did. There is nothing necessarily preventing practical science from occuring while at the same time our notion of empiricism is reduced to tautology.
Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.
Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)
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