How much of religious charity work is really fixing problems caused by religion in the first place?

Great Debates
1

I have been actively involved in my church for years, but recently realized I am atheist. We are disengaging from our church, but it is a long process.

Our kids are in a musical tonight, and there was a preview in the service today so I went to see them sing. I have been away for 6 months or so, so I was able to see my church with new eyes.

They are doing a lot of good work…really impactful work that is helping people. Indeed I have travelled to world with the church helping with some of this work. But as I was sitting there, an analogy came to mind…

(warning: Godwin ahead!)

Saying the church is doing good things is like saying the Nazi combat medics were doing good things. The individuals wouldn’t have to pass out so many bandages if the organization wasn’t so destructive.

My point is, even the medics were part of an evil organization. They are the proverbial lipstick on the pig.

If I look at the places religious people do the most “good” work, I think of inner cities, Central America, and Africa. And I realize that these places were ravaged by religious thought and religion-justified actions.

Hopefully someone who knows more about this will come along and show how I am right, or howi am full of bunk.

2

I honestly don’t think religion causes those kind of problems. Religion is often a tool used by those in power, but the real damage has to do with power struggles and environmental factors unrelated to religion

3

I think I’m going to need to hear more details about how religion ravaged the inner cities, Central America, and Africa before I can really offer any opinions.

It just seems sort of out-of-left-field. Like somebody saying “The 2012 Presidential election will be decided by the weather. Do you agree or disagree?”

It’s not really a matter of me agreeing or disagreeing. It’s more like I never considered the possible connection. And it’s not intuitively obvious.

So could you fill in the points between A and Z so the rest of us can follow your line of reasoning?

4

Give me a fucking break. Yet another born again atheist blaming religion for all the ills of the world. Religion does not cause poverty. Religion does not cause unemployment, or housing bubbles, or the economy to tank.

5

If you’re familiar with the tenets of the New Atheist Catechism, it’s not hard to guess what newcrasher has in mind. The most common claim in this regard is that the Catholic Church won’t let its members use birth control and this is what causes AIDS to spread. Of course if we look at a map of AIDS infection rates worldwide:

http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/HIVPrevalenceGlobal2006.png

We see that most Catholic countries have very low rates of AIDS infection, and that includes even the poor third-world countries–most of South America, for instance.

Another common claim is that Uganda recently introduced a bill that makes homosexual sex punishable by death (true) and that American evangelical groups are backing it (completely false). This seems to have arisen from the fact that many American churches are building schools, clinics, sanitation systems and other such work in Uganda, and apparently by being there they share responsibility for what the government does. (A classic proof of the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.)

As for ‘inner cities’ I really don’t have much idea what the claim is there. It’s generally agreed that government policy starting from the 60’s was a disaster for inner cities, regardless of political affiliation; where religion is supposed to come in I’m not sure.

6

Getting abortions outlawed and lying about condoms to produce a huge number of unwanted children does not increase the prosperity of a region. Nor do the religiously driven efforts to ignore the spread of AIDS. Nor do religious laws hampering women, who happen to be half the population. The religious practice of tithing and “prosperity theology” also encourage poverty.

7

a better question is, how much of the liberal charity (a lot of it done through the State) is spent addressing problems caused by liberal thought and action?

For instance, if the liberal State is doing charitable work dealing with the explosion of STDs post 1960s - guess why did they explode in the first place and why do they continue to remain high?

Or if the liberal State is helping the “single mothers” with their poor little children, such as by giving them taxpayer money or by shaking down the “deadbeat dads” - why do you think there are so many single mothers in the first place? Is it not due to the liberal policy of promoting easy divorce and giving various forms of “help” for single mothers?

And then there are the poor homeless, the beloved of the liberals. Why do you think there are so many homeless lately? How many homeless were there in America back in 1900, in a country that was 1. much poorer than America of today and 2. had few “housing standards” and “slum destruction/revitalization programs”? Or how many homeless are there in modern China, the not-so-liberal country that is poorer than America ever was in all of its history?

And on it goes. The liberals are like the Nazi SS who herd people into a concentration camp and then go around handing out bandaids for the problems specifically caused by the very concentration camp they are running. Let the people out, and then there would be no need to make sure that the beatings are being administered fairly by the kapos, starvation diet is shared out equitably and overcrowding at the gas chamber is prevented through superior scheduling.

8

Because we admit they exist, instead of trying to pretend they don’t?

“Illegitimacy” in America peaked in the 50s.

Because of right wing policies like dumping the mentally ill on the street out of the government run shelters/asylums under the theory that private industry would take up the slack. Something pioneered by Ronald Reagan here in California. And because of the constant shifting of the tax burden from the rich to everyone else, and the right wing mismanagement of the economy, slashing of public assistance of all kinds, right wing laws designed to punish the poor, and so on.

Ever hear of “Hoovervilles” and shantytowns and hobos?

9

You would have to first come up with a comprehensive list of problems “caused by religion” and then come up with a comprehensive list of “targets of religious charities” and you might then be able to determine what portion of religious charity work is directly addressing problems caused by religion.

However, to really get it accurate you have to take it further than that. For example there are four major religions in the world: Christianity (2.2bn), Islam (1.5bn), Hinduism (~950m), and Buddhism (varies ~400m-1.5bn in estimates.)

Each religion is different in enough ways that it is worth looking then at the specific problems that say, Hinduism causes and then seeing what portion of Hindu charity work addresses those problems. Do the same then for Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism.

Of course, even that isn’t very accurate. There are large enough differences between the different sects within all of those religions that you would then have to break it down further by major sects within each of the world’s major religions.

As can now be seen even getting close to a factual answer on this is going to be very difficult, and I honestly doubt a holistic study has ever been done on this topic. One of the major reasons I suspect that is it would be very, very difficult to empirically link specific societal problems to actions or stances of a certain religion sect.

Take the AIDS epidemic in Africa and the Catholic Church’s position on contraceptives. It is a much maligned position, and many people have blasted the Catholic Church for “killing Africans.” However, to empirically even demonstrate that the Catholic Church is “responsible” for the AIDS epidemic would be a herculean task. Unfortunately of course most people who have tried have had a serious axe to grind against the Church and thus it is difficult to take any of their conclusions seriously. Then there of course is the point most would not argue that even if we ascribe blame for the AIDS epidemic in part to the Catholic Church, no one would probably say they are entirely to blame. So do we blame 5% of AIDS infections in Africa on the Catholic Church? 10%? 25%? 50%? 0.5%? That is a whole debate in and of itself, and once resolved that is but one small portion of getting to the answer to the question posited in the OP. Every single analysis is going to be a major debate such as that.

10

bullshit! The mothers of those “illegitimate” children went on to marry their fathers. They sure as hell did not marry the AFDC or the family law shakedown system.

riight, because all the homeless are mentally ill. Ever heard of people living out of their cars because they cannot afford rent? Read all about it in NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/us/02cars.html?pagewanted=print . And sure enough, the State is already beginning to wage war against them by fining people who have no money even for rent.

how many hobos were there? How many of them were females?

What’s wrong with “shantytowns”? Would you rather live in

  1. a shantytown, with a roof above your head and decent neighbors of the same social class as you are
  2. a car, with continual threat of persecution by police
  3. on the street, homeless shelter and NY subway, with continual threat from criminals, police and the elements

The options are sorted in the order reflecting my personal preference here.

In short, liberals lie and dumb people believe and parrot their lies. The “big lie” in action par excellence.

ETA: something else to keep in mind is that Hoovervilles occurred long after the Progressives passed the housing standards, although not quite up to the modern high standard. So yes, that too was caused by liberalism. Who was stopping these people from living 10 people per room in a building with running water? The liberal government and its police thugs were!

11

Where do you get these crazy ideas? The illegitimacy rate in 1950 was about 5%. It was approaching 40% in 2007. Link.

12

The point about the RCC resisting attempts to stem the AIDS epidemic is a good one. I hadn’t thought of that. There’s no excuse for the Church to do that, and it does cause real suffering.

13

He might have been think about teen pregnancy rates, which were higher in the 50’s. That doesn’t equate to out of wedlock births, though, they were usually just forced to get married.

14

Now, my opinion on the matter is that the major charitable initiatives that Christian institutions in my area are out to tackle are probably not societal problems I would blame on any religious group.

For example a big thing around here is canned food drives. Considering the vast range in economic and fiscal philosophies amongst people within any of the major Christian sects I just don’t think you can blame Christianity for people needing food charity.

Homelessness is mostly a factor of mental illness and serious substance abuse in the United States. I can’t really blame the Christians for those, either. Mental illness is present in all societies, and substance abuse as well. The poor treatment of people who are mentally ill and people with serious substance abuse problems isn’t really something I can link to any major religious group’s position on the issues.

In the 60s and 70s there was a revolution in the treatment of the mentally ill. It was seen by both people on the left and the right that for most people, community based mental health services were preferable to institutionalization. People on the left and people who were advocates of the mentally ill in general felt this way because of the draconian nature of psychiatric hospitals and it was felt by many that while some people did need that intensive level of care, most people did not. People on the right saw a way to stop spending massive amounts of money on state mental hospitals, which are extremely expensive to operate.

What actually happened is we closed a lot of state psychiatric hospitals, and have been slow to react to changes in our population. While we had a legitimate ability to close some of those hospitals as we moved to community mental health as a focus, there was still and is still a certain group of mentally ill that need to be in a psychiatric hospital. Unfortunately as the U.S. population has increased States have not reopened or built new psychiatric hospitals to keep up with the base line level of growth in the population of the mentally ill that anyone would expect to see just because of basic demographics. So even though we moved a huge portion of people out into the community, we still have massive overcrowding in psychiatric hospitals because we closed more than we should have and we haven’t built new ones to keep up with population growth.

The persons who needed in a psychiatric hospital but could not get in, instead end up in psych wards in other hospitals (which are not really ideal) or they end up on the street. Most community mental health centers will not take people that are supposed to be in a psychiatric hospital because they are not equipped to deal with that in a dormitory style setting found in a residential group home. So that’s one source of the homeless.

As part of the transition to community mental health, it became much more difficult to have someone committed to a psychiatric hospital at all, or for that matter forcibly placed into any form of treatment. Some portion of the mentally ill population will never voluntarily undergo treatment, and will live in the streets unless we have a system in place to essentially force them into treatment. So that’s another source of the homeless.

On the community mental health side of it, most CMH facilities are operated by quasi-governmental private corporations, that usually have a pseudo-monopoly over a given region of a state. Most of the operating expenses of these companies are covered by State governments (who are acting as a funnel for Federal funds and also kicking in some portion of State money as well.) Unfortunately the funding is always dicey, and because of that CMH facilities are chronically overbooked, understaffed and underfunded, it is difficult to get more funding to open more residential group homes and even sometimes to fully staff existing ones, which results in fewer beds and worse treatment. So many homeless mentally ill who would be happy to live in a residential group home have trouble finding one, some of them might even be eligible for other forms of housing but unfortunately without the treatment aspects of a CMH group home they can’t really keep it together enough to make unsupervised housing “work” for them. So that is another source of the homeless.

Finally with substance abuse, it wasn’t until relatively recently that societal opinions have started to change, and it still has a ways to go. Many people feel that if you’re an alcoholic or a drug addict you should receive no help from the public at all, that you’ve chosen to destroy your life with drugs and you should be left on the streets to rot, essentially. In spite of that there are treatment facilities and shelters that house people with addiction problems. Most of them are just general homeless shelters that also offer some AA/NA meetings and may have a few counselors on staff. It is easier to fund a homeless shelter with a few addiction counselors than it is to fund a shelter or facility that specializes in treatment/housing of addicts. (That is because of politics.)

Finally, with most of the facilities that do exist for addicts there is a requirement that you not use or be under the effects of drugs/alcohol while at the facility. Many, many serious addicts will never agree to those criteria for very long, and either never bother trying or get kicked out of the facility when they show up at the front door plastered one too many times. A few states have started building facilities where addicts are housed and given a small stipend and permitted to drink essentially whenever they want. They are not required to undergo treatment whatsoever (they are called “wet houses”) the people running them essentially describe them as hospice level treatment for end-stage alcoholics who essentially have decided they will never get better and are happy to live in the wet house and drink until it kills them. I’m actually somewhat supportive of the wet house approach. I’ve seen many alcoholics in the homeless population who I think essentially cannot beat their addiction, it will kill them, and giving them a safe, warm place where they are allowed to drink and sleep you save the public huge amounts of money in emergency medical services, police services and et cetera. The wet houses I have read about house end stage alcoholics for about $18k a year, and I’ve heard that alcoholics living on the street sometimes cost up to $100,000 a year in services, so there is real savings and humanity in this approach, and I’d even like to see it extended to other drugs besides alcohol.

15

Central America, and Africa were ravaged by their own populous long before any outside religion hit the stage

16

Ravaged by religion is ravaged by religion. What difference does it make which religion?

17

incidentally, folks, why do you think the costs of medical care for the mentally ill are so surprisingly high nowadays, compared to measures like per capita income or typical salary? On the face of it, if the patient is consuming nothing but basic food and a cot and requires minimum oversight to prevent him from being attacked by other patients, just how expensive is it supposed to be? Just how many non-generic drugs and super-experienced RN’s does this process require?

How much did basic care for mentally ill cost back before the liberals set up the whole “mental health” industry? E.g. how much would it cost if the government were to allow some bunch of wannabe-Mother-Theresa nuns to run a minimum services permanent shelter for them, paid for by private donations?

But, but, but - you aren’t qualified, Mother Theresas! You haven’t got the license! You haven’t got the certification! You are not in compliance with government-mandated housing quality standards! You haven’t got nothing and you are mouth breathing religious nuts, so off to the streets with these mentally ill. The liberal State will take care of them… maybe. Some day. Change we can believe in. In the meantime, let them rot on the streets so we can keep bitching about Ronald Reagan and his evil mental health policies.

18

Religious charities don’t have the numbers, and blaming health care costs on “liberals” is moronic.

19

are conservatives imposing all those regulatory burdens on health care, housing etc? Are conservatives demanding expensive and often unattainable “compliance” from everyone and everything in these fields? Who is it that is sending the inspectors and the police thugs to keep people from trying to better their own lot or to help other people to the best of their limited financial abilities?

The movement that is doing it started out in early 20th century under the name “Progressive” and now goes by the name “Liberal”.

And yeah, the concentration camp inmates “don’t have the numbers” and blaming the SS guards for the inmates’ starvation and disease is “moronic”. So no need to release them. All heil the Liberal State. A more orderly and environmentally friendly crematorium is your inalienable human right which will be enforced with the full might of the law. Don’t even think about running away, right wing nutjob.

20

Heh. “Regulatory burdens.”