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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Doing good for God Faith and charity By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 799 words Publication date: August 28, 2005 In some parts of Africa, half of the hospitals and medical services are run by churches or other faith-based organizations. Some of the world’s largest relief organizations have a religious focus. And everyone has heard of Mother Theresa, whose work with the poor in India has been taken up by hundreds of similar projects worldwide. Across America, thousands of centers of faith are involved in the community, running soup kitchens or opening their premises to 12-step program. The Salvation Army has been raising funds to help the homeless and others for over a century. One study indicates that the religiously inclined are more likely than the secular to give time and money to charity. And one of the first steps that George W Bush took as president was to create a White House office focused on helping "faith-based" groups obtain federal tax funds. So when there’s such a strong link between faith in God and helping others, isn’t it churlish of atheists to criticize religion when it does so much good? Well, yes and no. It’s always churlish to criticize for the sake of criticizing and it’s not helpful to criticize unthinkingly, but let’s take a little time to look more closely at faith and charity. (We’ll leave hope for another column.) Why do people give? What do they hope to achieve? Where atheists are concerned, what you see is more or less what you get. A learns that B needs help. She either helps him or she doesn’t. If she does help him, it may be out of empathy or because she wants to feel good about herself, or both. Guilt may come into it as well (“it’s somehow my fault that I have a comfortable life and you don’t”), but that’s as far as it goes. Faith-based charity includes al the above and God. That extra ingredient gives rise to the suspicion that believers only give because God tells them to. Duty, not empathy, is the underlying motive. If God ordered them to ignroe the poor, they would do so no matter how much suffering they saw. For many people, that statement is manifestly untrue. Just as some faithful Muslims drink alcohol and some devout Catholics practice birth control, some believers would practice charity whatever God told them. Their desire to help others exists independently of their religious faith. However, the fact that religion encourages them to give probably explains why believers appear more charitable than the irreligious. Faith provides a conceptual framework which makes facilitates charity. Humanism has been much less successful in providing a similar framework that captures the public’s imagination. For other believers, however, charity is rooted in God not empathy. As writer Christopher Hitchens has documented, Theresa was driven by her fear of God, not the needs of the people that she claimed to serve. The woman who so many wish to declare a saint was not interested in helping the poor escape poverty. And although her hospices sheltered many who were dying of AIDS, she made no effort to use her prestige to spearhead a drive for a cure for the disease or to press for more funds to combat it. Theresa wanted the poor and sick to stay poor and sick, so that she could remind them that suffering was “a gift from God”. That is a message which comforts the rich, not the poor, and it is no coincidence that the Albanian-born nun had many rich friends. It is also notable that when she herself fell ill, she was cared for not in her own run-down hospice in Calcutta but in a comfortable clinic in California. Staying in India, but changing convents... Shortly after last year’s tsunami, 200 survivors in Samanthapettai in Tamil Nadu state rejoiced to see relief trucks packed with food, clothes and medicines enter their village. Their joy turned to anger when the nuns with the convoy refused to distribute any of the supplies unless the villagers converted to Christianity. Riots failed to stop the relief trucks leaving and the women in wimples drove off without comment when television reporters tried to interview them. Christianity is not unique. Extremists of other religions, such as Hamas in the Middle East, are equally insistent that aid is dependent on the recipients accepting their vision of God. Mainstream faith-based assistance is less demanding but it is still pernicious, because it ultimately makes charity nothing more than a response to an order from a mythical deity. Some argue that charities are needed which specifically identify as atheist. I disagree, but when we wish to give time and money, we should be sure to do so only through organizations whose allegiance is not to God but to the people they are trying to help. Whenever possible Martin Foreman responds to intelligent questions on aspects of atheism. Send an e-mail.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |