Every aid effective offered by religious groups is a secular aid. Medicine, food, soldiers, disaster relief, all of it and every bit of it. The aid that they alone can offer, prayer, is worthless. Religious aid is always and only is a co-option of secular aid or it is worthless prayer. Religion also is opposed to every secular moral advance until they are for it. Religious believers can't yell loud enough or often enough about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi being a leader of civil rights and a religious leader. That can do so only by ignoring the thousands of years of pro-slavery and pro-caste system background these religions come from. They perverted their faith, they didn't prefect it.
So, sure, help where help is most effective or meets your needs best. Religion will always let you do the work then take the credit so it's okay to not fight them openly at every turn.
That can do so only by ignoring the thousands of years of pro-slavery and pro-caste system background these religions come from.
I'm not sure about caste but for much of those thousands of years there was a lot of religious opposition to slavery, even if they sometimes wound up compromising with temporal interests. Purely secular institutions don't have a thousand year history, but during the short period of time they have been around, their hands aren't exactly clean on these sorts of things.
Today's post, Can Humanism Match Religion's Output? was originally published on 27 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Your Price for Joining, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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