I am not alone in noticing this paradox.  As Christopher Hitchens says, at the beginning of chapter six of his book “God Is Not Great,”

There is a central paradox at the core of religion. The three great monotheisms teach people to think abjectly of themselves, as miserable and guilty sinners prostrate before an angry and jealous god who, according to discrepant accounts, fashioned them either out of dust and clay or a clot of blood. [...] On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind.

Of course, religion’s paradoxical view of humankind’s position in the universe is extremely useful to its adherents. It allows them to assume the aura of extreme abasement and modesty when claiming to be doing things in “God’s name,” while simultaneously allowing them to attack naturalism and atheism as concepts which reduce human beings to nothing better than unthinking farmyard animals.

Since, as unsaved human beings, non-Christians are supposedly deserving to a fate far worse than the one the lowliest of farmyard animals will suffer, it’s hard no to laugh when non-believers are attacked in this manner. I guess using their twisted logic, a special place in Hell is a step up in importance from simple oblivion… somehow.

One topic that came up—and invariably does in these debates—was the issue of charitable giving, and the fact that religious people give appreciably more of their time and money to charity than secular people.

While Hitchens attempted to rebut that assertion by pointing out that religious charitable giving often comes with strings attached—i.e. as part of some type of evangelical outreach to win more converts—I think the basic truth that religious people give more is hard to deny. Hitches also talked about the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s effort to raise money for survivors of the Haitian earthquake which, while laudable, but doesn’t begin to cover the shortfall.

While I was looking for more information on the subject, I came across this article on the Hoover Institute’s web site, Religious Faith and Charitable Giving by Arthur C. Brooks. The numbers Brooks presents are quite compelling:

The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions.

But note that the difference doesn’t just apply to Christians. People of all religious faiths are equally generous with their time and money. So whatever the reason is, it’s not a reason specific to one religion. Thus believers cannot legitimately claim that their generosity is because of some intrinsic moral virtue or rectitude of their faith. There must be factors at work that are common to all major religious groups.

Furthermore, the importance of charitable giving isn’t restricted to one political group within a religion either:

Note that neither political ideology nor income is responsible for much of the charitable differences between secular and religious people. For example, religious liberals are 19 points more likely than secular liberals to give to charity, while religious conservatives are 28 points more likely than secular conservatives to do so. In other words, religious conservatives (who give and volunteer at rates of 91 percent and 67 percent) appear to differ from secular liberals (who give and volunteer at rates of 72 percent and 52 percent) more due to religion than to politics.

Religious liberals are also much more likely to donate time and money to charitable causes than their non-believing counterparts. (This does not surprise me in the least since my parents are both liberal Christians and have always donated a lot of their time and money to charitable works.) Now it is true that liberals typically believe that the government should have a greater role in helping the poor and needy in society which, in turn, should reduce the need for private donations, but that belief certainly doesn’t stop religious liberals donating their time and money at the higher rates typical of all religious believers, so the reason why religious people give more is little to do with politics.

Finally, after a lengthy critique of government welfare and how he believes it is harming religious faith and charitable giving, Brooks gets around to addressing the causes of why religious believers tend to be more generous than non-believers:

It might be that religion simply has a strong pedagogical (endogenous) influence over giving and volunteering. Houses of worship might teach their congregants the religious duty to give, and about both the physical and spiritual needs of the poor. Simply put, people may be more likely to learn charity inside a church, synagogue, or mosque than outside.

I don’t think there is any doubt that houses of worship are highly influential when it comes to charitable giving. But it’s much more than just teaching people that they should give.

First, congregants are not only taught that it is their moral duty to give, they are often told in no uncertain terms that “they will be known by their fruits”—that if they are indeed faithful to their religion, they will show it by donating their time and money to worthy causes. This is an incentive above and beyond just telling people that it is the right thing to do.

Second, religious leaders are constantly reminding their congregants of their religious duty to give generously, particularly in times of crisis. For example, how many American pastors passed up the opportunity to preach a sermon about the moral responsibility of looking after those less fortunate than ourselves in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Very few, I’d wager. And it’s not just the leaders who regularly remind believers about charity, it’s peer pressure too. In any congregation there will always be a number of people looking for help with one worthy cause or another—looking for people to help staff the local homeless shelter, looking for sponsors for a marathon run in aid of earthquake victims, and so on. If you are an active member of religious community, it’s hard to avoid all these requests for your time and money.

Finally, religious institutions encourage charitable donations by setting up the infrastructure that makes giving as easy and painless as possible. Every Sunday in millions of churches around the world, a collection plate is passed under every congregant’s nose. In many of those churches, you can even set up a monthly direct debit to send your money from your bank account to the church’s own coffers without lifting a finger. And as a bonus, you get to save some money on your taxes too. There are stalls in the church coffee room selling Traidcraft goods in aid of Third World poverty, and tables set up where people can volunteer their time to help out in the local community—no need to organize anything, just turn up on the day and help. The list of ways that religious institutions help people donate their time and money to charitable causes is endless.

It’s also worth remembering that while most organizations charge a membership fee in order to help fund its financial obligations, religious organizations typically do not, and thus all monies collected from members in support of their operations are classed as charity, thus greatly boosting the overall amount religious people donate.

Compare all that with the experience of the non-believer. There is little question that the vast majority of non-religious people believe that charitable giving is a good and moral thing to do. Even without access to a vast religious infrastructure to help them, two-thirds of all non-believers still donate money to charity on a regular basis. So why don’t non-believers donate as much or as often?

Simply put, they lack the same motivations and opportunities that religious people have.

Non-believers do not have their moral duty to give to charity preached at fifty-two Sundays a year. They do not have a collection plate waved in their face every week reminding them of their obligation to make a donation. They do not typically frequent places where large on-going efforts to raise money for charity are underway, and they usually only have their consciences stirred when some great tragedy hits the news headlines—like the Ethiopian famines, Hurricane Katrina, or the Haitian earthquake.

So I don’t think that it is at all surprising that non-religious people give less of their time and money to charity. But it’s not because non-believers are intrinsically less moral in any way, it’s simply because they lack the same obligations, encouragement, and outlets that religious people have.

Brooks finishes his article with an excellent suggestion:

If charity is indeed a learned behavior, it may be that houses of worship are only one means (albeit an especially efficacious one) to teach it. Secularists interested in increasing charitable giving and volunteering among their ranks might spend some effort thinking of alternative ways to foster these habits.

From personal experience, I know this can be done. I used to work for a corporation that provided the means to donate part of your paycheck directly to a charity of your choice. Once a year, they asked for a volunteer from each department to give a presentation to their colleagues reminding them of the good causes that are helped by the money donated through this program. They then spent the next month encouraging their employees, almost daily, to sign up and donate part of their paycheck every month for the next year.

This is small beans when compared to the things religious institutions do, but it works. Millions of dollars are raised every year through programs like this—millions of dollars that likely would not have been donated at all without them. I am not afraid to admit that my charitable giving has dropped off quite steeply since I left full-time employment, precisely because I am no longer regularly exposed to exhortations and convenient opportunities to donate on a regular basis. Yes, I know it would take the minimum of effort to go to the website of my favorite charity and start a monthly direct debit from my bank account, but human nature dictates that when we’re not regularly reminded of the importance of donating to charity, we tend to let it slip from our mind.

The Internet has certainly helped when it comes to getting the message out, and for creating ways to make it easier to donate your money and time. And if you wanted to donate a small sum to the Haitian earthquake appeal earlier this year, you only had to tap about 15 keystrokes on your cell phone using the “text HAITI to 90999 service,” but I think it would be foolish to suggest that anything can fully replace the utility of the vast ecosystem surrounding charitable giving that religious institutions have built up over many decades, even centuries.

If there is one hope, then it would be in efforts to give many more people a taste of what it’s like to donate one’s time to charitable works. Study after study have shown that engaging in regular volunteer work can be a great benefit to one’s mental and physical health. It doesn’t matter if the volunteerism is conducted through a religious institution or not, almost everyone who tries it, even for a short time, begins to experience those personal benefits first hand, making it more likely that they would want to continue doing it on a regular basis.

Naturally, it is also important for non-believers to introduce their children to the concept of charity. When I was a kid, the church I attended would hold sponsored walks and other activities that exposed me to such things. I don’t have any children of my own, but my brother and his wife (who are both non-believers) have two daughters, and just this past Christmas, the girls unilaterally decided that they didn’t need all the usual expensive Christmas presents, and suggested that we spent less on gifts to each other and spent the rest on charitable gifts in each other’s names instead. The rest of us agreed to take part, and as a result we must have raised between $500-$700 for various charities just within our extended family.

So there are plenty of ways to encourage charitable giving and instill good habits outside of the auspices of a religious group, though I do not underestimate the scale of the task of matching the charitable work encouraged by and performed through religious institutions. But the key point to remember is that there is nothing mystical or supernatural about the greater generosity of religious people. It is merely a product of the education, indoctrination, promotion, and facilitation carried out by the religious institutions they belong to.

A 19-year-old Army gunner, Spec. Ross Andrew McGinnis, from outside Pittsburgh, was on patrol in Baghdad’s Adhamiyah neighborhood. A grenade was lobbed through his hatch and into the Humvee. Realizing the four soldiers inside would not be able to escape in time, McGinnis dove into the vehicle, threw himself on the grenade and absorbed the full force of the explosion.

McGinnis was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. “He had the opportunity to escape,” his father said. “He chose not to.”

Every story of sacrifice holds up a mirror to the greatest sacrifice of all, the one Christians around the globe commemorate this week – the sacrifice of Christ.

But really, assuming that Jesus was the son of God incarnate and did indeed die on the cross, was his sacrifice greater than that of Spec. Ross Andrew McGinnis, or of any other person who has given their life to protect others from harm?

Not hardly.

Jesus, according to orthodoxy, is not only the son of God, but God himself, omnipotent and omniscient. And while he may have wrapped himself in the limited cloak of humanity, no theologian ever suggests that Jesus didn’t know of his true nature when he went to the cross, or that he didn’t know he would “rise again” a mere three days later.

What did God—what did Jesus—really sacrifice? His life? Everyone dies, and millions of people have died agonizing deaths either through illness or at the hands of others, and unlike Jesus, not one of them had the comfort of being certain that they would “rise to glory” immediately upon their death. Reports say that Spec. McGinnis was a member of his local Lutheran church, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a Christian, but even if he believed that he was “going to be with the Lord” as he made the ultimate sacrifice, it’s still not the same as knowing.  There is still doubt, worry that you might be giving up the only life and existence you will ever have.

And what of the doubters, the non-believers or agnostics who makes the same sacrifice? They have no hope for an afterlife of eternal glory when they lay down their lives to protect others. They believe they are truly sacrificing everything. They have nothing more to give. There is no sacrifice greater than that.

Of course, the ultimate absurdity of it all is that God supposedly concocted the whole sacrificial lamb plan in the first place. It was entirely his decision to do it that way, and I am sure that an omniscient being could have thought of a billion other ways to go about “saving” a small portion of the human race that didn’t involve him being nailed to a cross for a few hours before ending up back in Heaven and entirely none the worse for wear for the experience.

No, unlike the real and noble sacrifice of Spec. McGinnis, there was hardly any sacrifice involved at all. In the grand scheme of things, Jesus’ sacrifice is much more the equivalent of the sacrifices made by the bosses who worked for a week in the most menial jobs in their company for the CBS show Undercover Boss.  In other words, it was voluntary, planned, self-inflicted, and the consequences were entirely temporary.

That’s right, attack atheism:

At the installation of the Most Rev Vincent Nichols at Westminster Cathedral, his predecessor, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, described a lack of faith as “the greatest of evils” and blamed atheism for war and destruction, implying that it was a greater evil even than sin itself.
  …
In his homily at the service, Archbishop Nichols did not refer to child abuse, but pledged himself to a battle against the advancing tide of secularisation and a defence of faith.

Well, I have news for Archbishop Nichols.  In a country where fewer than 10% of the population attend any kind of religious service on a regular basis, the “advancing tide of secularisation” has pretty much finished the job of sweeping away the religious tradition that has terrorized generations of children all around the world. There is certainly has little interest in bolstering the influence of an autocratic heirarchy that condemns millions of people to an agonizing death from AIDS by warning them that using condom during sex to protect themselves from the HIV virus is a sin.

Citing St Paul, he said that faith was not only compatible with the mind’s capacity for reasoned thought but complemented it.
 
“Some today propose that faith and reason are crudely opposed, with the fervour of faith replacing good reason. This reduction of both faith and reason inhibits not only our search for truth but also the possibility of real dialogue,” he added.

Yes, faith can be compatible with reason, but only if faith continues to adjust to the realities that reason, through the scientific process, discovers.  The Catholic church has been on the losing side of the war against reason since the day it was founded.  It may, of course, win the odd Pyrrhic victory (e.g. Galileo) but in the long run it will always have to reverse its stance on the issues or risk becoming irrelevant.

The Catholic church eventually had to bow to the inevitable and embrace Galileo’s discoveries and, more recently, they accepted that the evidence for evolution, a purely secular concept in opposition to everything the Church had taught about the beginnings of life of Earth, could not be denied.

But where the Catholic hierarchy holds out against reason—e.g. condom use, IVF, embyronic stem cells, and abortion—they have been all but ignored, even by many in their own flock, as reason trumps their irrational faith-based stances on the issues.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor went farther. Referring to the battles that will be won and lost in the effort to sustain the Christian presence in secular society, he said: “What is most crucial is the prayer that we express every day in the Our Father, when we say ‘deliver us from evil’. The evil we ask to be delivered from is not essentially the evil of sin, though that is clear, but in the mind of Jesus it is more importantly a loss of faith. For Jesus, the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils.
 
“You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trust between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people.”

In a week where one of the greatest evils possible—the systematic abuse of defenseless children who were given up into the care of those who were entrusted to keep them safe—was revealed to have been perpetrated by his own colleagues in the Catholic church, this statement could hardly be more ill-timed and ironic.

British society has been getting along fine without the major influence of religious institutions for the past quarter century now, and they don’t need lectures from pompous autocrats in silly hats to tell them what’s just and meaningful in their lives.  I would wager that far from stemming the tide of secularism in the UK, Archbishop Nichols’ first homily in his new post will result in the net loss of congregants for the Catholic Church, which is as it should be.

I was born and grew up in Britain, where my family were heavily involved with the Methodist Church—a very liberal denomination by American standards—and I continued to attended church services, if somewhat sporadically, after I left home and well on into my twenties.  Although I have always had moments of doubt about Christianity, I didn’t seriously consider the possibility that it may only be the elaborate invention of the human mind until I was in my early thirties, soon after I had arrived in the States.  (The two events are not entirely coincidental.)

Having made several trips to the U.S. before moving here, I was already aware that the Christian community is divided into two camps when it comes to the doctrine of salvation—one that believes you must ask for and receive personal salvation before you can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and one that believes personal salvation is not essential and that you can get into Heaven as long as you a lead a reasonably decent and honest life, even if you are not a Christian.

That may sound odd to Americans who are only familiar with the very public face of the Religious Right in the U.S., but there are millions of liberal Christians who balk at the thought of billions of non-Christians being destined for eternal damnation when they die.   Many choose to ignore the issue, but those who do study it often end up minimizing the importance of salvation by claiming that “many ways can lead to God.”   And so they gain comfort in believing that even if you are a Jew, a Muslim, or a non-believer, you can still get into Heaven when you die—unless you’ve been a really bad boy, like those archetypal denizens of Hell, Stalin and Hitler.  Thus salvation becomes little more than an optional extra in their eyes—it’s nice to have, but it’s entirely unnecessary.

Obviously, conservative Christians regard this attitude to be a dangerous copout that results in the damnation of millions of souls that could have been saved.  In a way I tend to agree with them.  If Jesus really said “No one comes to the Father except through me.” and if he was correct, then Christians who seek to minimize the importance of salvation are living on dangerous ground.  But having considered the ramifications of the doctrine of salvation for myself, I also find myself rejecting the notion that any deity worthy of praise would ever impose such an illogical and capricious system of rules upon us.

When believers don’t insist on making salvation an all or nothing thing, it isn’t really an issue worth spending much time debating.  But when the act of “being saved” is made an absolute requirement for all those who want to avoid uncountable trillions of years of unimaginable suffering and torment in Hell, it colors the believer’s worldview so much that the impact of this doctrine is felt well beyond the walls of their house of worship, into the political and cultural realm beyond to the point that families are torn apart and religious dogma replaces good government policy.  That is when others need to sit up and take notice, and that is why I have decided to write a series of blog posts about the issue.

I will be examining the various problems with the doctrine of salvation in more detail in future posts in this series, so please stay tuned.