A Governments job is to provide a framework for a workable social structure. One of these tasks is to provide funding to organizations which supply community service projects for all manner of society needs including such things as drugs and alcohol services, Indigenous and multicultural services, mental health , aged care . You name it and there will be some kind of funding for it .
Billions of dollars a year worldwide up for grabs.
What concerns me is that religious organizations seem to receive the greater proportion of this funding and yet if we look back into history it is not hard to find that the roots of most social problems can be related back to religious ideology .
In Australia you have the cultural destruction of the stolen generation and and its long term effect which is now evident within the indigenous community brought about by the collaboration of government and both the catholic and anglican church .
In Africa another colonized country, you have the same religious sponsored destruction of tribal community law and belief systems which has led to years of corruption,war , poverty and sexual disease .
Yet it seems that religious bodies have never been called to account for the predicament that society finds itself in .
To the contrary these same institutions are now being funded to supply alcohol and drug services to indigenous cultures, the homeless and teenage services.
Since the mid 1980s there has been important operational and attitudinal shifts in the way governments manage funding for welfare services.
Firstly governments have shifted a growing share of services to non-government organizations . This may be because it is cheaper, and possibly more efficient for delivery of services relative to social programs .
It may also be the case that funding to provide services enables governments to distance themselves from policy failure or poor service delivery .
This raises important questions about if and how the private sector, community organizations and religious organizations differ in their motivation for providing services and the way they approach them. Do they deliver services in different ways to non religious entities?
One would wonder how religious based providers can supply impartial services which are not slanted directly towards there own policies regarding such things as the propagation of faith, the ongoing dismantlement of earth based beliefs and outdated belief structure around sexual practices.
It would seem that not much has changed and that religious affiliations still influence political policy .Have a look at (http://www.catholicchurch.org.uk/catholic_church/legislation_and_public_policy)
I can only wonder what sort of programs are being funded and whether modern inquisitional methods are used to control the outcomes of publicly funded projects.
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