After the dust settled, the audience effectively voted down the measure, demonstrating a feeble victory of sorts for atheism I suppose, but the debate was interesting to watch, regardless the outcome, and touched on a few of the points you bring out above.

Of course, I’m kicking myself about this moment, considering that I somehow managed to lose the URL to the debate. Maybe you’ve already seen it, or some wiser visitor than I can conjure it up for your edutainment.

Good essay, regardless!

It is scandalous for the atheist/humanist mindset to be forced to recognize that the VAST majority of benevolent work in the world is driven by Christian money and effort. I applaud your recognition of it here.

That’s just not true. There are plenty of secular charities, but they don’t bill themselves explicitly as nonreligious any more than they bill themselves as non-communist. Oxfam is entirely secular. The Red Cross is basically secular, despite the name. Bill Gates is nonreligious. Warren Buffett is agnostic.

I have to admit, too, that I’m frustrated by seeing other Christians argue that the world needs religion generally. That’s not really the claim of Christianity. Christianity has a very particular story to tell, and even though I’m not a Christian triumphalist and I’m committed to pluralism, that’s not a story that is interchangeable with other religious stories. The “people need religion” angle, usually advanced by conservative Christians, don’t seem to distinguish Christianity from Scientology or Roman paganism. Religion, in that argument, is just a healthy part of an ideological diet — that’s a rather asinine way of presenting alternatives to non-religious modes of living.

Nick:

#1 — It’s not clear to me that that’s true — do you have any citations to back up that rather bold assertion? I’m suspicious for a number of reasons (not least of which being that Christians are emphatically not meant to go around tooting our own horns about our benevolent work), especially since I suspect that these days Muslims probably spend more per capita on benevolent works than Christians, and make up a substantial portion of the world’s population. That’s just a guess, but an educated one.

Numbers for benevolent giving are always suspect, too, because they don’t take into account volunteer labor (which is significant, hard to quantify, and something that American Christians are a bit worse at than others in the world) and they do take into account things like pastors’ salaries and building upkeep that should not be strictly classed as benevolent giving or good works.

I also don’t buy the idea that atheists are “scandalized” by admitting the good work Christians do. In my experience, much of the tendentiousness between atheists/agnostics/humanists/other non-theists and Christians is created by the Christian side.

#2 — That’s just total nonsense. I know many non-theists who engage in significant benevolent work. Furthermore, the call to do such works is issued week in and week out in Christian churches and ignored by many in the pews. People are people — by and large, we’re selfish and sinful. We should remove the log from our own eyes before going around telling humanists about the specks in their own eyes.

However, it doesn’t take much research to show a few problems.

1) It is scandalous for the atheist/humanist mindset to be forced to recognize that the VAST majority of benevolent work in the world is driven by Christian money and effort. I applaud your recognition of it here.

2) You do well to point out that within Ethical Humanism, there is a call for men and women to dive whole-heartedly into benevolent work. Yet, as point 1 embarrasingly points out, it just isn’t happening. The call is being ignored.

3) What if God is passionately dedicated to driving out evil in this world (not by destroying this world… by purifying it), to preserving everything good in this world(not by taking it out of this world… by protecting it), AND loves people too much to take everything out of their hands? What if He were doing those things RIGHT now, and was offering men and women the choice to get in on it?

respectfully,
Nick