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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, I really dislike that so many of the US domestic charities are religiously driven.

I guess another way of looking at it is why aren't there more atheist charities? What is it about religion that makes people help other people so much more?

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I think secular or non-religous would be a better choice of words, and there are plenty.

Religous groups account for "31% of all donations", so that leaves a lot for other groups.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...

This is a misnomer. I looked in the education section and the 4th item down was a educational charity sponsored by a religion.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

That 31% is donations to churches (from what I'm reading). Not donations to charities organized separately from the churches.

So if there is a catholic charity which focuses on Haiti, then that would be excluded from the 31%.

Interesting, religious peoples in the US account for 77% of the country[1] - I wonder if a lot of religious folks just end up supporting secular charities or if the general understanding that religious donations support the majority of charities is incorrect.

1. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

And a lot of that 31% is churches members paying their own dues -- as though me paying for a gym membership were a charitable donation.

It would be if you gym membership funded a food bank and orphanages.

Studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who if anything are likely to skew the numbers more positively), across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget", and an additional 5% goes to "church run programs" (be it after school care, social or group activities).

I would suppose that many atheists see the state as the secular alternative to charity.

And sadly, many atheists see it as a charity that others have a greater obligation to pay into than themselves.

i.e. "The government should replace charity, and only the millionaires and billionaires should be the ones paying for it".

I'm atheist myself, but I've definitely seen this reasoning make it easy for fellow atheists to explain away their lack of charity.

> why aren't there more atheist charities?

Depending on your definition, pretty much all activist organizations could fall into this. Red cross, project eden, engineers without borders, etc. Honestly I'm stumped as to what constitutes "atheist charity" vs any non profit whose goal is not "spread the word of $deity".

> why aren't there more atheist charities?

Black swan effect? It may just be that the charity and/or atheism isn't reported.

> that makes people help other people so much more?

I think that's reading a lot more into both motivations and actions than is possible from here; or, in other words: I think you're anecdotally on to something - my religious neighbors definitely feel more kind / charitable than my other neighbors - but science would need to be done. For example, perhaps it's not the "religious" part but the "community" part that drives participation in charity efforts. I also wonder about the role that tax exemption plays into all of this.

What is it about religion that makes people help other people so much more?

I can think of 2 reasons why the religious want to help others:

   1. Within many religions, the concept of charity is tied to eternal salvation
   2. Helping people is a good way to recruit numbers

I guess another way of looking at it is why aren't there more atheist charities?

Why pick on atheists? What about secular charity or otherwise irreligious charity? Many such charities/aid groups exist. Doctors Without Borders, ACLU, Unicef, Goodwill, Oxfam, Rotary International, etc.

More importantly, what about social security?

I think the US government is too conservative when it comes to relying on outside entities for help getting people up on their feet. It really should be a government's prerogative to proactively help people enter society as a productive member, earning a wage, staying healthy, spending money and paying taxes, no?

Now then, yes, there are many, many valid religious charities (and by this I mean organizations, as well as that component of church giving that factors into benevolence).

But by studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who if anything are likely to skew the numbers more positively), across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget", and an additional 5% goes to "church run programs" (be it after school care, social or group activities).

If a secular charity - and lets go back to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten) we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e. doing what they are being given money to do).

I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if charities were to regularly spend only one per cent of their givings on what they got to enjoy tax exemption to do, they'd likely have such a status revoked.

And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.

A study by ECCU (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.

So I -do- place some skepticism on the idea of blanketing 'religious giving' as 'charitable contribution'.

I would assume because atheism in and of itself doesn't stand for anything. It would be a bit like having a dislike-of-bowling based club. Most secular charities are centered around their goals and methods, not their lack of particular beliefs.

It's also worth noting that in the US, there still exists a fairly strong bias against any openly atheistic people or organizations[1], so it would make sense to direct the public's attention towards what they're doing and therefore away from what they don't believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_atheist...

I think people here are using atheist and secular interchangeably.

When people say atheist charities, what they are trying to say is secular charities lacking any religious affiliation. They aren't trying to say charities that are actively "affiliated" with being atheist.

Most religions are centered around the afterlife, and you can't take anything with you when you die. The dogma of most religions states that charity is good and will help get you into whatever version of heaven they believe in, hence charity.

A friend of mine teaches computer science at a small Jesuit college.

He was wanting to put together a program where students would go volunteer to help NGOs do software projects in India.

Something he was surprised by was that NGOs in India are almost all oriented around lobbying the government to do things (particularly that they'd already promised to do) and not around provisioning social services themselves.

My understanding is that in some religions, we are living today in the "afterlife" of a previous life, and subject to karma based on what we've done.

If one has bad karma that has put one in an undesirable social position, it's not a stretch that Earth is a hell for those people, and we're supposed to be the demons that make life miserable for them.

> My understanding is that in some religions, we are living today in the "afterlife" of a previous life, and subject to karma based on what we've done. If one has bad karma that has put one in an undesirable social position, it's not a stretch that Earth is a hell for those people, and we're supposed to be the demons that make life miserable for them.

Can you name those religions for me. I view everything as deterministic and see the world as either heaven/hell. Although the idea of karma doesn't make sense when understanding determinism. Since everyone is destined to do bad or good depending on the life they're born into.

edit: whoever downvoted me, I'm asking a simple question and stating what I observe. Please let me know why you find the need to downvote for that.

If I’m remembering correctly, a few Eastern religions do

I get the eastern religions that reference karma but the part I'm interested in is from "it's not a stretch that Earth is a hell for those people, and we're supposed to be the demons that make life miserable for them" and because I haven't seen that expressed before. It would be nice to know the specific names that share that ideology of others being demons for some that are destined to experience a bad life this time around.

Hinduism? Isn't it the goal of all good Hindus to make sure that Dalits have a bad time of it?

Thanks, never saw this before about Hinduism.

This is the hypothesis that religious people are gullible, stupid, and selfish - only concerned with the threat of their own eternal torment in hell, not with the welfare of others.

It's offensive.

It's offensive to many, but it's also unquestionably true of a non-trivial portion of the religious populace. That subset of the religious demographic is also prone to making equally-offensive but less truthful accusations along the lines of saying that atheists cannot be moral because morality can only come from their god.

This is the hypothesis that charitableness can be modeled on a normal distribution, but the additional incentive of religion shifts the mean of that distribution higher for religious people than atheists. It's not offensive to believe there is a subset of the population that is influenced by the dogma of the church to do things they wouldn't already do.

Are you suggesting non-religious people do think they can think take stuff with them when they die?

I'm suggesting non-religious people don't bank on an afterlife therefore don't have an additional incentive to give.

Most religions teach the golden rule.

Treat others as you want to be treated. And if I was poor I'd want someone to feed me.

I’m not sure I buy it. Similar logic leads people to believe that atheists, lacking fear of retribution from a vengeful god, are more likely to commit crimes. I believe the data suggests otherwise. This suggests a moral center in atheists that comes from somewhere else.

My guess is that there are simply fewer atheists.

Similar logic leads people to believe that atheists, lacking fear of retribution from a vengeful god, are more likely to commit crimes.

I don't see how this follows. There are punishments for committing crimes that don't come from a vengeful god, like punishment from a legal system.

Generally speaking, the legal system is supposed to punish religious believers, too, not just atheists.

I never claimed otherwise.

I think the reason religious organizations have a good hold on running charities is because they have big enough places to host them. I'm guessing the administration task of hosting a charity is a hurdle unless you have big enough buildings already for it and where you know when it will be used compared to nobody using it.

Many atheists see the state as the secular alternative to religion.

This is a little concerning to me. I see religion and the state as opposing forces for change. I wish we had more diversity in how atheists could organize outside of religion.

That’s awful. There is nothing voluntary about giving to the state nor is there any selection in what cause to support. Pretty antithetical to charity.

Why do you think charity needs to be voluntary and give you the option to be discriminatory? It sounds like your idea of charity centers more on making the donor feel good about their choices than on actually helping people most in need. If taxpayer-funded programs can do a better job of helping people than religiously-motivated charities, then your concerns about whether it's voluntary are antithetical to the end goal of helping people.

There's another word for being "charitable" with other people's property, and that word is "theft".

True, yet they often do not realize it. It's also why authortarian governments do not like independent religion.

it's the same reason you don't see many atheist "churches". the organizational problem--getting a bunch of people, along with their resources, aligned--has already been solved by the overarching religious organization (and companies, incidentally).

it's then a smaller step to use some of those organizational resources for evangelizing in the form of charitable acts.

Assumption of facts not in evidence. The secular non-profits don't go around trumpeting their secularity and banning religious people from services.

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