Give to Charity, not Church

This page: Good natured people do good with or without religious pressure. Much good is done with ulterior motives such as wanting to get to heaven or self promotion. Giving to Church is the least efficient way to give to Charity, most your money goes elsewhere. When religious adherents or ignorant people claim that religion, in the modern world, is a charitable enterprise they are overlooking the greater role that secular philosophies play in all charitable work. Religion in the modern world undermines charity work, misleading it, instead of helping it.

Contents:

1. Give to Charity, not to Church
2. Does "religion" in general get credit for charity work?
3. Motivations Behind Charitable Work

1. Give to Charity, not to Church

“The Church is funded from public money - they have no income of their own - but where does the money go? It goes into their rituals, their wages, their legal battles and their running costs and finally some of it escapes as aid to those who need it. The next time you decide to give to charity, make sure it is not a church, for you are funding ignorance and inefficiency. I would rather go and help in person, than to trust someone else to use my money. [...] Does it not bother the Pope that he can sit in a palace with the entire Vatican around him, extensive and rich ritual upheld for the trivial respect for outdated customs whilst half the world needs basic facilities? The Vatican has an annual revenue of $169 million (USD).”

Vexen Crabtree, "Why dispense with Christianity or theism?", 1999

“Let us put this into real terms. If you give a very generous donation of £100 pounds to St. Albans Cathedral in order to feel good about yourself, to aid the poor, for charity, etc, then the amount that actually goes to charity is £5.50. 95% of your money has gone elsewhere”

Vexen Crabtree, "If you want to give to charity; do not give to Church", 2001

Studies on Church funds have found that a surprising amount of collected money is stolen before it even reaches the official books of the church, so the percent wasted by religious charities (if you give to Church collections) is even higher than the figures above suggest.

“A survey by researchers at Villanova University in the USA has found that 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded had discovered embezzlement of church funds in the past five years, with 11 percent reporting that more than $500,000 had been stolen. The finding casts doubts on the morality of many Catholics who rapidly give in when temptation is put in their way. When no one is looking, the cash that goes into the collection plate does not always get deposited into the church's bank account. [...] Last October alone, three such cases surfaced, including one in Delray Beach, Fla., where two priests spent $8.6 million on trips to Las Vegas, dental work, property taxes and other expenses over four decades. In June, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. fired its second-ranking financial officer, Judy Golliher, after she admitted stealing money that church officials put at more than $132,000.”

National Secular Society (2007)₁

2. Does "religion" in general get credit for charity work?

Yes. Religion as we know it in the West is largely a do-gooder in terms of charity. Charities have been historically founded and ran by religious groups both large and small. However this is largely due to the fact that good people who want to do good deeds have historically been easily tricked into Churches because it was seen as a good thing to do. Nowadays in the secular world, good people no longer feel social pressure to affiliate with Churches. It is obvious, increasingly since the enlightenment, that religion and morality are two completely different ball games, often separated by quite a distance. In the modern West, charities are largely secular, the most successful and largest of them being ran by secular government directly. Even charities that on paper are "religious" are often, in practice, secular. This is especially true where a charity was "founded" on "the principles" of any particular religion (normally a sect of Christianity, in the UK), but this traditional reference has become irrelevant to the reality of the present people involved.

“The Church of Scotland's Board of Social Responsibility is now the largest voluntary social work agency in Scotland and is second only to Strathclyde Region's social work department, but religious affiliation plays no part in the selection or training of the personnel who provide its services, which are indistinguishable from those of local authorities.”

"Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults" by Steve Bruce, p40-41

3. Motivations Behind Charitable Work

• Small religions and sects contain good-natured people who want to do good, and think their religion offers the correct framework. It also contains many who wish to promote the sect through doing charitable, public-eye work. This is morally impure, an ulterior motive. We are all aware of "charities" that sneak in religious propaganda in with social aid. Examples would include a large contingent of American and British Fundamentalists who organized themselves to help the poor in Iraq, and took with them thousands of copies of The Bible rather than, say, food.

• Large religions frequently contain good-natured people and have got traditions of charity work. But, the example given above was the charitable work of the Cathedral of St Albans, Hertfordshire, such organisations often have massive overheads, especially as all large religions have lost over half of their income over the last generation as numbers fell. In short, large religious charities are often inefficient financially. Morally they are superior, often performing charitable work at their own financial expense, although some of course do so in order to re-gain public support.

• Secular charities are nearly entirely comprised of good-natured people trying to do the right thing, and are often zealous, high-energy endeavours. Government-ran ones are frequently almost autonomous and partially under-funded, meaning that there is little scope for corruption, ill-motives or waste. Secular charities are probably the hardest-working, most morally-conscious entities with few ulterior motives other than to reduce human suffering. Government-ran charities do of course suffer from the interference of politics, and ulterior motives can surface that have much more to do with the image of the government rather than the reduction of suffering.

In short, good-natured people will find ways to do charitable work with or without religious justification. It seems that those who do good work for its own sake (i.e., atheists, etc) are more moral that those who expect a great reward (heaven). [For a full text on this, read "Confused Religious Ethics" by myself, 1999]