Atheists and Charity
Atheist groups should not act like church organizations. If you are a non-believer and feel the need to give to charity, need childcare, be chronically positive, follow an ego and be politically correct, join the Unitarians.
Charity has 2 inherent problems:
It's almost impossible to know what happens to your gift unless one has first hand knowledge.
In order to be sure you are helping someone, you need to know something about that person. Often the one who has their hand out is the person least ashamed of asking for help and that is usually the con artist. They know where and how to find donors. People in need are usually busy dealing with their problems to advertise them to the populace.
When you hand out money for charity, are you helping someone in the short term just to enabling their dependence on aid thereby hurting then in the long run? What if your $25 ends up in the hands of thieves or some pot bellied magistrate's pocket? This is a very common problem. I have never agreed with atheists engaging in charity as a group - there are plenty of ways to do that already.
Atheism is a philosophy and as long as the holy books say we are evil, the religious won't care how many bug-eyed toddlers we feed or how pleasant we behave.
Charity has 2 inherent problems:
It's almost impossible to know what happens to your gift unless one has first hand knowledge.
In order to be sure you are helping someone, you need to know something about that person. Often the one who has their hand out is the person least ashamed of asking for help and that is usually the con artist. They know where and how to find donors. People in need are usually busy dealing with their problems to advertise them to the populace.
When you hand out money for charity, are you helping someone in the short term just to enabling their dependence on aid thereby hurting then in the long run? What if your $25 ends up in the hands of thieves or some pot bellied magistrate's pocket? This is a very common problem. I have never agreed with atheists engaging in charity as a group - there are plenty of ways to do that already.
Atheism is a philosophy and as long as the holy books say we are evil, the religious won't care how many bug-eyed toddlers we feed or how pleasant we behave.
Labels: Charity, unitarians
posted by Rev. Barky | 5:26 PM
3 Comments:
The link to the tone doesn't work.
I respectfully disagree. Not with your analysis of charity scams, but with the idea of not supporting secular charitible orgs. I advocate making a few charities, perhaps Oxfam, or UNICEF the main line for aid. This would effecively keep money out of the hands of the religious charities, and would starve a long line of redundant bean counters, lawyers, and yes, their administrative assistants. If obtainable, this would put more money in the hands of people doing actual work. It would also curtail some religious org's ability to grossly underpay "volunteers" who again are doing the actual work. It's a dream of mine.
No matter who you give money to for charity, you really don't know if you are really helping anyone. We saw a doc about aid orgs in Africa and although there were lots of impoverished people, what best to do for them seemed a difficult and complicated proposition.
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