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Decline in giving is linked to decline in religious belief

Denyse O'Leary
December 8, 2019
Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Religion, theism
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Of course:

The share of U.S. adults who donated to charity dropped significantly between 2000 and 2016, according to an analysis released this month from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and Vanguard Charitable.

By 2016, just over half — 53% — of Americans gave money to charity, down from 66% in 2000. That figure held mostly steady until the Great Recession. Then it started to drop off and took a dive after 2010, said report co-author Una Osili, associate dean for research and international programs at the Lilly School.

Giving to charity is, of course, a core belief for many of the world’s major religions. And very religious people of any faith are more likely to give to charity, one study by Baylor University researchers found.

But there are fewer very religious people than ever in the U.S.


Leslie Albrecht, “Fewer Americans are donating to charity — and it may have nothing to do with money” at MarketWatch

If you believe in God, you believe that everything is connected and that He knows what you do for others. An that He will tell you what He thinks at some point.

If you believe that we evolved randomly and that the world has always been governed by Darwinian survival after that, you would only give if you felt like it. The “giving gene”? The “evolutionary psychology of giving?” Sure. That’ll work.

One outcome, unfortunately, is that government takes up the slack, which has two bad effects:

  1. It reduces the number of genuine innovations in help (because entrepreneurs are, on the whole, more creative than civil servants could be) and
  2. It reduces the ability of communities to help themselves, requiring more top-down intervention, leading to a sense of grievance and entitlement rather than a sense of community accomplishment and pride in achievement…

Prediction: Atheists will end up paying much higher taxes for much poorer results and everyone will blame everyone else. No one has responsibility and everyone is a potential scapegoat.

See also: Sceptic asks, why do people who abandon religion embrace superstition? Belief in God is declining and belief in ghosts and witches is rising

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Comments
I believe almost everyone who has been exposed to Christianity (and probably many others) knows that there is an underlying spiritual reality : two opposing armies, one good, one bad. Unfortunately, in our flawed human terms, 'Take up your cross daily and follow me' (at least on the path to Calvary), would not rank very highly as an attractive slogan to most of us, without the help of divine grace and its being located within a coherent and broader context and world-view. Indeed, I have only once come across a reference to 'passivity' by a Christian writer, a nun, and that, pejoratively, while, it is clearly the corner-stone, as per the slogan, and so much of Jesus' teachings, most of which seem so extreme to us that we find ways of attenuating his message. For example 'Regard the lilies of the field', 'turn the other cheek', don't ask for the return of a loan, give your coat if someone wants your jacket,' etc. Moreover, the Benedictine spiritual writer, the recently beatified, Augustine Baker, taught that growth in the interior life, in prayer and holiness, entails an increasing introversion. Without that divine grace, people will naturally look for quick returns via spiritualism, for example, some, mostly younger folk, getting sucked into into witchcraft, black magic/satanism, etc. which latter are apparently well peopled by powerful habitues of the 'dark side', even it is said, the highest degree of the Freemasons, although the lower degrees are innocents in that regard. I believe I read recenly that some evangelical charismatics had gone over to the 'dark side', and the dangers of ouija boards is fairly well-known, even fairly widely experienced. A chair levitating is normally enough, one would imagine, for people to call it a day as regards such 'games'. However, with so much misery all over the world, it's hardly surprising, I suppose, that people will try to cut corners in their efforts to see that light at the end of the tunnel - no not that high-speed Japanese train coming in the opposite direction - that NDEers speak of. As has been stated on here by different posters, there is a plethora of actual scientific proof of Christianity, of which, of course, the Resurrection is pivotal. The 'Shroud of Turin' even attests to a singularity that occurred in the form of an absence of gravity, whereby the body of Christ must have laid suspended, hovering between the two sheets, (top and bottom of the single, long shroud sheet.Axel
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