Your comment about religion is incorrect. Americans are very generous: https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2017-total-charitable-donat.... Conservative Evangelical Churches spend an enormous amount of time and money helping people. For example: The Southern Baptist Convention runs the third largest disaster relief organization in the country behind the Salvation Army (also religious...) and the Red Cross.
I could give lots of other examples. I'm not sure where this perception about religion is coming from. Maybe in Europe the church is largely dead, but that's not true in the US.
The original post was about empathy not "being generous".
I was raised in a very religious family and in my experience most religious people are not empathic at all.
Yes, there are exceptions, especially amongst the more mystical types, but most religious people are "generous" because they are trying to score points for the afterlife. It's fascinating to see how people act in church (where they feel God is watching) versus how they treat eachother the rest of the week.
Could I not restate your comment as "Ignore the measurable stats, my anecdotal experience suggests a lack of empathy?"
In my experience, those who are most empathetic are generous in spirit, which would include not necessarily revealing to you that they are very religious, as well as in generosity toward those in need.
The comparison is valid only if monetary generosity is linked with empathy. It seems as unproven a statement as saying monetary giving frees people from the dirtier emotional work of empathizing.
Societally, not sure it matters much. OTOH, I think it's probably more fair to compare church giving relative to the tax breaks they receive, rather than simply say they give a lot. They do, but it's amplified by a tax deduction, which isn't available to emotionally supporting/empathetic people.
There is, of course, no reason someone couldn't be in both camps, but this comment is long and rambling already.
I'm not sure I have a solution for quantifying. Even defining "empathetic acts" is something I struggle with. To me, the crux is whether someone puts themselves in the shoes of a less fortunate person. You can do this without helping, just like you can help without doing this.
Anecdotally, the homeless people I've spent time talking to seem to appreciate the conversation (or maybe being treated as a human being?) as much or more than the dollar or two I frequently give.
Utilitarianism might suggest donations as a decent proxy. Can't say I disagree, although I'd like to know how generous churches can be if they didn't receive a tax break.
Exactly. Generously donating to a charity (or worst case: an anti-abortion fund) has nothing to do with empathy. Even in church I have heard people say the most insensitive things about less fortunate people (sure, she was raped by this violent rapist, but she wants an abortion, tssk!). The most empathic, loving and caring people I know aren't in church.
"Europe" is a huge place that's a lot more diverse than the US. Christianity is still official state religion in various places; Germany still has tithing baked into the tax system!
My perception about religion is coming from the fact that evangelicals supported Trump and recently Roy Moore. Without that support, the ACA wouldn't be dismantled and a lot of minorities would be better off. It's like evangelicals in America invented their own form of Christianity that is far different than what Jesus preached.
Ooh, not so much. There are arguments about that postulate the conservatives give more to charity than liberals.
That's only true when you count religious giving.
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 (http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten.detail&...) 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.
My point was that SA itself is an evangelical charity. But you're right that SA (like many religions) considers homosexuality to be sinful to the extent that they'll employ LGBT people in all positions except clergy, and they've served LGBT people in need long before it was fashionable.
NYC government has a particular moral ideology and they don't like that SA performs such an important function (caring for the poor that NYC neglects) in their city without buckling to their moral agenda. They would spend the lives of tens of thousands of impoverished citizens if they could force SA into a more palatable theology.
NYC went after them several years ago for exercising their right to refuse to employ openly gay clergy. They wanted to close down SA in NYC despite that SA provided a huge portion of shelters and other homelessness relief (something like 60% by some measure IIRC). And they wanted to pin the blame on SA ("We can't believe you'd force us to shut you down and let all our poor people starve!") when it was clearly their prerogative. They only changed their minds when it became apparent that they would lose the PR battle.
Around that time, someone started a "Let's hate on SA for being homophobic" thread on Reddit, but so many formerly poor people from all over the country (including many LGBT) came forward with their stories of how the SA saved their family from poverty; none of the first hand accounts corroborated the "SA is homophobic" narrative.
If you truly care about social justice, you support SA because they are clearly doing more good than any similar organization in the US; everything else is just social justice fashion.
Most Christian denominations teach, to one degree or another, "love the sinner but hate the sin." So while they may think of homosexuality as a sin, they don't hate people who are homosexual. All people are sinners, after all.
The homosexuals still receive a disporpotionate amount of hate relative to "other sins", often by people pretending they are not hating as they parrot this phrase.
That misleadingly implies the reasonable plausibility of a coincidence, for example that it is random chance that gay marriage is a nation-wide political topic but the legal status of eating shellfish isn't.
Fundamentalist Christians have very strong views on certain things that you and I may disagree with, but that doesn't mean that Christianity or religion itself more broadly is a cancer.
For instance, they hate abortion because they view it as murder, which is itself a morally consistent position to take. If you believed abortion was murder I'd hope that you would hate it to.
We just happen to disagree with them on the status of a fetus.
Now their intolerance of certain groups (LGBT people most prominently) itself cannot be tolerated, but their intolerance is more a result of religion being influenced by the status quo of old world values.
As society as a whole becomes more accepting of different people over time, religion will also adopt those values just as successful religions have always done. Viewed in this light organized religion is not a cancer but simply something that must be refined a bit in the context of our changing society.
There are lots of organizations that do good in people's lives. I don't see why that needs to be tied with bigotry. I hope we don't accept a concept of a moral debit card, like a doctor who can save many lives, so we should tolerate a little abuse. When we can't stop abuse, we will endure it, but when we can, we ought not.
I find it also surprising that the Christian muscle in this country is immense, they could move mountains, but for over 20 years the only issues which has captivated their national attention have been sexual ones. And now there's this transgender business.
Is there no Christian political consensus to be had on the poor? Why was there national discussion on a constitutional ban for gay marriage during the presidential elections? Did the thought of stopping gay marriage rally the base?
Social issues like marriage that can be easily legislated about are much easier to deal with than systemic problems like poverty, therefore people will give more attention to the social issues. It's just an example of bike-shedding. Talk about the small scale things you can control rather than the large complex issues that are more intimidating.
But attitudes about marriage and sexuality are really very small and insignificant aspects of religion as a whole. Politics and culture war have inflamed certain issues in America, but those issues will resolve themselves in time.
Once they do people will have less of a reason to be mad at religion. What I'm cautioning against is conflating frustration towards religious attitudes about particular things that are slowly changing in the present with thr idea that there is something fundamentally wrong about religion itself.
If you made a mistake about something, I wouldn't automatically assume you yourself are broken. I would just help correct you then wish you the best.
Being morally consistent has zero value for third parties. You can be morally consistent and commit genoside. If your viewpoint creates hate then their is no excuse, that's inherently bad.
In terms of LGBT hate, that's largely an outgrowth of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam etc and their cultural influences. For comparison you need to look at what they replaced, and that's very much a mixed bag.
I would suggest that when you have a large number of options the bust by metric X (Morality) is unlikely to be chosen if it's Metric Y that's used. For the same reason the gold metal winning sprinter is unlikely to also be the best looking.
> You can be morally consistent and commit genoside.
I don't think that's true. At some point, an abhorrent moral code is going to entail a proposition that is either factually incorrect or inconsistent with itself.
People disagree to the degree killing cows is OK. But, both sides can be consistent based around what lives matter. Classify Group X say Murders, Outlaws, Nazi's, white people, or even humans outside the tribe in the killing allowed category and everything can stay consistent.
> Classify Group X say Murders, Outlaws, Nazi's, white people, or even humans outside the tribe in the killing allowed category and everything can stay consistent
Except it's not consistent with basic facts, like the fact that the differences between any group of humans is non-existent. There's also a Kantian argument to be made that killing period, is inherently logically inconsistent.
differences between any group of humans is non-existent
That's clearly a false assumption. As long as I can identify a group say people who's social security numbers end in 7 then their exists a difference between them and all other groups. Now placing any real value on having a SSN ending in 7 may seem meaningless, but the difference exists.
PS: It could even be useful as a means of load balancing.
> That's clearly a false assumption. As long as I can identify a group say people who's social security numbers end in 7 then their exists a difference between them and all other groups.
That's not a difference, that's an arbitrary classification that has no moral implications.
A meaningful difference with moral implications would be something like one race being superior to another, as the Nazis believed, or some bloodlines being divinely selected, as the Royal family of England once believed. This enables you to argue that one class of people is bound to a different set of moral prescriptions than another.
When arguing that one group of people have different moral prescriptions, then you are implicitly asserting that there is some objective, factual difference between these groups that entails this conclusion. Such differences don't actually exist, ergo, there is no justification for treating them any differently.
You said different with zero qualifications. Paint colors are different, but that does not imply a moral difference.
Now, assigning meaning to differences is by definition part of a specific moral framework and does not generalize.
To a theoretical "hyper intelligent" 207 dimensional being we may not qualify as sentient. After-all, anything bound by something as meaningless as time is incapable of making decisions and will always respond the same to given stimuli at specific points of space-time. Such linear beings don't actually feel things they simply respond to stimuli much like plants.
AKA Same facts, different interpretation = different moral framework.
PS: Do we save women and children first, or are young warriors more important to long term survival? Same 'fact' different interpretation of that fact.
That's right. The "difference" you pointed out is not a difference of the people themselves, it's a difference in classification in a completely separate system from the people.
Suppose a killer asteroid is coming and we can only save ~10% of the population.
If you do pure random assignment then having a 7 at the end of your SSN could make a difference. EX: We rolled a 10 sided die an a 7 came up. On the other hand if you want to maximizing the number of people saved other things may be considered (Age, weight, vision etc).
I am not going to say a specific system is the only correct one in that case, but rather many of the differences you suggest are meaningless could suddenly become meaningful differentiation in a moral system. Further, those differences are not necessarily inherently important outside of that specific system and situation.
Ok, here's a question that bugs me for decades (literally)
For instance, they hate abortion because they view it as murder, which is itself a morally consistent position to take. If you believed abortion was murder I'd hope that you would hate it to.
How is it that the most virulent abortion haters are such staunch believers in the death penalty?
While I'm aware that this statement is not 100% true it significantly more often than not seems to be the case.
Note that I don't intend to provoke, or get into a flame war, but I'm really curious about this utterly inconsistent view.
Many religious people don't think the death penalty is a good thing. When I questioned a Catholic monk about this very issue he told me that while the Church condemns both the death penalty and abortion, because abortion affects tens of millions of "people" each year it's given more attention by the Church than the death penalty which affects many less people per year.
However for those that do support the death penalty while at the same time condemning abortion, it's important to realize that for them there is no inconsistency.
It goes like this: abortion is bad because the unborn are morally equivalent to birthed people (by virtue of their souls), and they are essentially innocent beings.
Criminals are not innocent, and therefore killing them is excusable.
Their belief is not inconsistent because of the role innocence plays. Now you may disregard the importance of innocence here, but that doesn't make their views inconsistent.
Thank you for the great response. Much appreciated.
Their belief is not inconsistent because of the role innocence plays. Now you may disregard the importance of innocence here, but that doesn't make their views inconsistent
Well, what about a significant number of people executed, which were completely innocent? There are some absolutely galling stories out there about innocents being executed despite the fact that there were huge doubts on their guilt or on the verdict as such due to the conduct of the proscutor (withholding evidence, using known liars as witnesses, relying on more than dodgy "scientific" evidence, recanting of witnesses who had a personal motive to snitch in the first place, etc).
In that view the possibility of one innocent person being killed should automatically illegitimze capitol punishment. Apparently it does not.
While I can understand the stance of the catholic church I still think that logically you cannot oppose abortion, while supporting the death penalty.
You made me understand, however, that this inconsistency is not applicable to a lot of those people. It doesn't make it logically less inconsistent in my view.
Anyway, thanks for the insight. It's at the very least, very interesting.
> In that view the possibility of one innocent person being killed should automatically illegitimze capitol punishment. Apparently it does not.
> While I can understand the stance of the catholic church I still think that logically you cannot oppose abortion, while supporting the death penalty
I think that the Catholic view is that murder is defined as "intentional taking of innocent human life" and that it is immoral. In this case you are not intentionally taking an innocent life. Similarly in case of abortion, the church does not oppose treatments that could save the mother's life that could cause the child's death. Here, your intention is to save the mother's life, not to hurt the child. The loss of child's life is an unintenional but unavoidable side effect : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_and_the_Catholic_Ch...
When Pope Francis addressed the United States Congress, he was chided by many for denouncing the death penalty which took 23 American lives in 2017, while staying silent on abortion, of which 652,639 took place in 2014.
There are certainly churches, typically evangelical, that are rabidly anti-abortion while promoting the death penalty, but it's less common in Catholic communities or even mainline Protestant denominations.
Just in numbers though, the number of abortions performed in a day probably dwarfs the number of death penalty executions performed in a decade. If you'd agree to outlaw abortions in exchange for outlawing the death penalty, most pro-lifers would probably take that deal in a heartbeat.
I believe abortion is murder. However, I also realize it can be medically necessary if the mother's life would be threatened and so it should be permitted in that instance. Now, I don't deny that abortion is economically useful for some because it obviates personal responsibility, but I think that use is murder. There is the tricky situation when rape is involved, and while I still think it's wrong I'm not adamantly against it in that scenario.
I also believe execution is murder. However, for extreme cases I think it is necessary to execute people who have committed the worst of crimes when it can be definitively proven (e.g., rape, torture, and deliberate murder).
So in my mind both are morally wrong, but there are extreme situations where they should be permitted and I think are necessary.
It's mostly the older generation. Younger people seem to be more accepting of everyone. Even the ones that call themselves conservative, when you talk to them, there more Romney, Bush conservatives than Mike Pence conservatives and definitely not Trump faux populists.
Yes. Indeed most of the religions practiced in America preach, above all other things that you think matter, putting your fellow humans first despite their background, race, social status, etc. I know Catholicism (despite some of its institutionally conservative warts) explicitly preaches tolerance, the prerequisite for social diversity.
What I've observed in America of late is a lack of religions maintaining social relevance and so increasingly becoming scapegoated by the crazies that hold out. I also consider scientific method to be an unconventional "religion" insofar as it's proliferated enough to have crazies of its own telling people how to live their lives and making dogmatic claims it itself cannot even support (your god isn't real we haven't observed it yet--would sound petty and absurd were the same argument made to counter theorized atomic particles).
It's hard because religions need to take the more difficult moral and ethical stances that no (faction balancing federated democractic) government should take, and like you mention with abortion some of those end up leaking out into the legal system.
Marriage is another thing that's danced the line but I think it falls on the other side: people let it leak into laws, or more accurately it existed in laws as the status quo, when it doesn't belong there. Two gay peole who are truly e.g. Catholic can happily live together and love each other. If they believe the Catholic criteria and definition of marriage they do not seek it. Yet they are fully allowed to openly share their love in any way the church allows for any other unmarried couple. Sexual intercourse, a beautiful enjoyable act in the church's eye, remains for the purpose of procreation and is respected not as a lustful act of pleasure, but as an intensely spiritual experience under the pretext of two married humans creating a child. In practice and due to it being socially progressive and now very safe (old "status quo thought" of abstinence is a good way to prevent spread of disease), of course people have lots of extramarital sex. But those people are not to be shunned, or excluded in most Christian sects. Extramarital sex is no more grave a sin if it between two members of the same sex as were it between a happily engaged heterosexual couple. So marriage is a religious concept that should mostly remain religious. Legally as a society it's probably in our interest to subsidize couples or parties living together (sharing space and resources) and then further subsidize those parties who choose to raise children (of their own or by way of adoption). But man it kills me how many people on both sides brought religion into what was largely a social topic during the whole marriage equality push despite the fact that I agree with the outcome.
So what is the problem? Globalization exposes fundamental radicals easier? Perhaps, but I think in America it's our ingrained social willingness to yield to "prosperous" economic policy that ends up causing the economy to ehm trump human rights. IMO it's a slow trickle of those decisions that has caused us to regress. Why is healthcare expensive, because it must prove its value economically. We don't value health enough (or we value the healthcare industry too much) to make sacrifices required to legally mandate socialized care (we would kill a huge industry, and then it's just a huge expense the government incurs that didn't exist before, lose lose). It's really that simple albeit no less unfortunate, and I personally have the health care industry to thank for most of what I've been given in life. A true doctor will take care of all patients who stumble into the ER whether they get paid market rate or not, it's part of their ethical code. So in that sense we have some sort of basic level of universal healthcare. We just haven't all agreed whether we should pay for your weed and contraception and experimental procedures and more reasonably your preventative medicine (although the business model discourages prevention while selecting for continued consistent doctor visits—another problem) too. And we certainly have failed to convey to the less fortunate an attitude of openness and acceptance and assure them that they will be taken care of to a reasonable extent by our doctors and hospitals. Insurance companies with convoluted policies and systems designed to minimize their payouts certainly don't help paint that picture.
The same thing has happened to education. Both "industries are seen as businesses and expected to run like one (make money). As long as the peripheral participants in these industries (hospital/school executive staff, insurance/loan agencies, etc.) keep demanding we run things like a business, and as long as we as Americans are okay condoning said behavior directly or by proxy of hyper economic political focus, nothing will change. Call me crazy but since when is caring for the health of your neighbor or raising the next generation to be better than the current iteration about making money? Sadly in America, it is.
dogmatic claims it itself cannot even support (your god isn't real we haven't observed it yet--would sound petty and absurd were the same argument made to counter theorized atomic particles).
The difference is that god is supposed to be observable, and isn't. You can look at religious texts and teachings and say "doing this should show that effect", and see that it doesn't.
For theorized particles, they come with "this is how to observe it, we just aren't able to do the experiment yet". And then when research technology reaches the point where we can, someone goes and does the experiment. And at that point, a lack of results absolutely is taken as evidence that whatever particle doesn't actually exist as predicted.
A year ago, I would have agreed with you because all examples of Religion I saw were like that. They provided help with strings attached. They did things to make sure non-members followed the rules of their religion.
I found about a Unitarian Universalist church in my area and now am considering joining.
In contrast to other religions I've seen, the UU church welcomes everyone no matter their background or who they love. The church I attend has a reproductive task force that helps pregnant women and new moms no matter what they have decided to do with the pregnancy. There is a group that goes to Planned Parenthood in my city to protect women from the protesters. They by diapers for mothers with no money to buy them. They will give rides to doctor appointments for those that need them but can't afford them. They strongly believe we need more sex education and free birth control and that if we have those the need for abortion will be greatly reduced.
I share your view of the Southern Baptists and their fellow purveyors of hate and hypocrisy but that’s much too strong as a general condemnation of all religions. As a simple example, when I walk by the Methodist office near the Capitol and see a huge banner asking Congress to ban torture, improve the deplorable conditions in US prisons, help refugees, etc. that doesn’t seem like a cancer to me (and, FWIW, those are at least biblically-supported positions unlike the Southern Baptists’ which earns some respect even from an atheist). There’s also a lot of hate and violence committed by people who aren’t part of a large organized religion but instead follow their own interpretation or one hateful preacher, so that qualifier isn’t particularly useful.
The big distinction for me isn’t whether you believe but whether the focus is internal or external: some people use their religion for self improvement, pushing themselves to be better and help others more; other religions seem to use it as a justification for trying to coerce other people to share their beliefs and to ennoble the hateful things they were going to do anyway. I have far fewer problems with the first group, whereas the latter is completely toxic and increasingly dangerous since they started getting politically active in the 1970s in the backlash to desegregation (abortion wasn’t even an issue until they needed something new to dehumanize the opposition with).
I could give lots of other examples. I'm not sure where this perception about religion is coming from. Maybe in Europe the church is largely dead, but that's not true in the US.