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Comment by betenoire | Hacker News Reader

As an atheist, I think good people are gonna be good. What does religion have to do with it. I was once very religious, and my experience is that good people are good, regardless of belief or lack of.

You'd probably be a good person without your religion, so I'm not convinced that I should give any credit to your religion. Probably more credit goes to who raised you.

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And yet, religious people give more to charity than secular people.

The effect disappears when tithing is excluded from consideration.

There are many ways to slice that, but in any case, it's NOT symmetric. To the extent that religious people "donate" more, it's only because one of their primary outlets for self-expression happens to be considered a charity!

My previous church expected full members to tithe (not required, but strong social pressure). And that counted as "charity" even though the vast majority of that money only benefited us (worship space and a pastor eats up a huge percentage of funds). I'm sober-minded about the fact that this space was really for ourselves, no matter how charitable the intent.

However, membership dues in my local hackerspace (where we also do some charity, but where again the vast majority of funds go towards infrastructure for ourselves) aren't considered donations. Those are dues, not tithes (aka donations).

In any case, as someone who tithed for years, IMO maybe 10% of tithing goes to truly charitable causes. Maybe.

So when I hear "Christians donate more to charity!" and then read "but effect disappears with tithing is excluded", what I really hear is "we spend lots of money maintaining our clubhouses". Not because I'm judgemental or anything, but because I've seen both church and other non-profit entities finances. It's just the reality of most community-organized non-profits that don't have explicit charitable goals as their primary intent.

So, to be clear, there's nothing wrong with funding a space and your pastor's salary (or, for that matter, paying to lodge for out-of-town hackers/lecturers). But the asymmetry in how those are accounted comes with hopefully clear entailments about any purported higher moral ground for one over the other.

Thank you for this response. I, too, gave 10% of my paycheck to my church for many many years. It was "charitable donations". I still give, but in different ways. And not to huge organizations with no accountability or transparency.

As if donations were a measurement of personal quality anyway...

Thanks for the info. I have updated my assumptions accordingly.

With time, I have come to realize that giving to charity is not a good measure of goodness. In statistical terms, it would be if the data was not biased. However, that's not true.

A lot of religious institutions tell followers that charity is required by God, and doing charity would make them more liked by God (and hence you will get a better treatment in after-life). This makes it very difficult to compare the data across the two groups.

Giving to charity is not some absolute measure of goodness. Plenty of charities are of questionable value. Plenty of people who give to charity still treat other people really badly, even abusively so.

It's part of the culture of religion. It isn't per se a measure of goodness.

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