I was wondering what you meant by “classicidal ideations”. I guess now I know.
“Libertarian” encompasses a wide range of people with different viewpoints. I guess “Republicans without God” would be the best general description of them.
The most extreme (or ideologically pure, depending on your POV) advocate getting rid of government altogether. A slightly less extreme version advocates altering it so its only function is the protection of property rights. They talk about “free markets” a lot, but when you try to pin them down on what that means, exactly, you can’t.
I think the different ilks, flavors, whathaveyou, stem from people stumbling on the term from multiple directions without much knowledge of its history or context.
I think there are lot of folks disaffected with the lefty loosies or righty tighties and whose disagreements with their default parties push them in a libertarian direction (although maybe not screaming off the cliff) and so they use that label.
Others arrive there from trying to apply a rigid and simplistic philosophical framework onto real life. That is how babby Randroid is formed.
I hadn’t even heard the term until a teacher (pre-internet) gave us one of those “political compass” quizzes, which we all took and plotted our scores on the board.
I can get on board with distinguishing non-profits that primarily carry out charitable work vs those that do not. I imagine there are probably some categories where it gets fuzzy, but I’m comfortable with fuzzy.
The claim that “conservatives give more to charity than liberals”. That is an inflated claim if charity means paying the preacher’s salary or building a new college football scoreboard. I mean, tithing 10% is what the church calls for. I doubt even many liberals give over 10% of their income to secular charities. To call your 10% tithe to the church charity and then claim you give more to charity than liberals do bothers me. Am I being petty? Yes. But the whole premise that “conservatives give more to charity than liberals” is petty to begin with.
Makes sense to me.* Now, that church probably carries out some charity too, so one could probably calculate how much of various people’s donations actually goes to what you are calling charity. But I don’t know that anyone has those data. It would be an interesting study if it existed. Not necessarily to prove an ideological point.
*Although as we’ve seen here, they way people use words differs, as does how the IRS classifies things.
Liberals also give to to universities, art galleries and their churches. So unless you can find a source of charitable giving and the recipient donors - tough to handle.
As my church donations - the salaries of the pastor and staff are part of the spend, yes. They also spend most of their during the week visiting shut ins, hospital visits, home visits and counseling. Our location has a preschool where half of the children are subsidized or outright paid for by our church. We fund aid in Nicaragua, we provide most of the supplies to a local school, and we take care of one women’s shelter. Our space is booked every night with other groups such as addiction recovery groups, job training, and homeless in transition. Once a month we turn over our main community room for ones week to 5 families who are homeless as well (we would do more on that one, but the cops are watching us).
So those church donations? That isn’t a gift to me, that is a gift to others.
That is all very admirable and 100% falls within the definition of charity. My question is do you think that is typical of the average church across the USA?
Look, I am going to respond to this in two separate posts because I want to emphasize and isolate my comments. I’m glad you are involved with churches like that. But I ask you again do you think that is the most common type of church in the USA?
On a related note, a 100% charity (as we’ve recently loosely described it) might have such high overhead that less money goes to the charitable acts than for a church that is also paying for sermons and fancy windows.
I think we’ve become thoroughly sidetracked, although it’s been a strange thread from the start.
I wanted to make one post directed to entirely positive comments. I really really really admire what you do with that church. I know there are other churches like that also. At the end of the day I think practical matters and utilitarian measures are the most effective. So what you and your church are doing is to a great benefit to people in general and even though I normally have an anti-religion bias I wanted to make sure that you knew I admired your efforts in this particular category a great deal.
I honestly don’t know - all I have is anecdotal. Some churches, if you look at their actual cash flow, seem to put most money to the building and salaries - but that fails to capture the value of the space to other groups, and a lot of the outreach. What is the value of having a meeting place for gay christian teens who have attempted suicide? It costs us nothing for the room, the salary of our youth minister is already covered, and the pizza and drinks cost is negligible. Given that we are a congregation that ordains gays as ministers, and marries gay couples, we attract more than a few people raised Christian who were thrown out of church and home.
So I can build a spreadsheet where I take the hours given, multiplied by the rate of a standard counselor, add in rent for a meeting place and the cost of soda and pizza - and that is some of our charitable work.
Even churches whose interpretation of scripture I am opposed to do some great charitable work, all with a safe home base to operate from. Its a cost and benefit allocation.
Similar to the donation to universities that result in a name on the building. I am very happy that Stanford created the university (and that his wife kept it going). I benefitted from their largesse significantly, and that of later donors who helped cover my tuition. Some of their intentions might not have been 100% altruistic, but they had a positive impact regardless.
So when libertarians (small l) such as myself state that charity can and should begin at home - at least of few of us practice what we philosophize.
That lists local, national, international benevolence expenditures at collectively 3%. Though, to be fair, this is for churches self identified as evangelical churches. I’m sure other types of churches might likely give more.
My examples of churches who don’t have your level of service/giving would be anecdotal as well. And kind of beside the point. Beside the point that… I admire your church and can say that you’ll do an amazing amount of work and giving to help people.
So you’re saying I used a cliche of both extremes to prove a point?
HOLY F*** THAT WASN’T INTENTIONAL!
By the way, you do a lot of convenient redefining of mainstream political thought. The robber-baron age is seen as a highly libertarian, or laissez-faire, period of our history. “You didn’t build that” is, at its core, a socialist conception of the economy.