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Lumifer comments on The Atheist's Tithe - Less Wrong Discussion
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Two points.
First, the hard part in all of this is to actually persuade people to donate. You're proposing a simple rule, but you're silent on how will you convince the people to accept the rule.
Second, the doctor and the accountant you would like to reach are (at least in the US) most likely Christians. If you do convince them to donate 10%, they will most likely donate it to the church and church-affiliated charities. Mr.Murphy would have a good laugh if your proposal ended up giving massive financial resources (and so, power) to churches in the US.
Er, Christians are already pressured pretty heavily by their churches to tithe, and churches have come up with numerous ways to make it easy and fun. I don't think atheists starting to also tithe maybe will change their incentives much.
I grew up Catholic and go to church occasionally, sometimes on vacations(thus not only my church), and I only know about tithing academically. I have never been asked to tithe let alone been "pressured pretty heavily"to do so, in a systematic way.
Now I drop into the collection plate, but nowhere close to ten percent. I have also worked with the total, and less than five percent of checks are over twenty dollars.
Just a data point.
Another couple of data points:
I spent decades as a pretty serious Christian (Church of England, in the UK; the CoE encompasses multiple styles of Christianity, and I was towards the evangelical end). There were from time to time sermons etc. encouraging us to give money to the church, but tithing as such was seldom mentioned and never regarded as an obligation.
My wife is still Christian and active in a church (also Church of England, also in the UK, kinda middle-of-the-road in theology, style of worship, etc.) and I'm pretty sure its donations are far less than 10% of the congregation's total income.
The Church of England gets about £400M in donations per year. Average weekly attendance at CoE services is about 1M. If we guess that 80% of those are regular attenders, and that all donations come from regular attenders, that in line with national statistics 64% are of an age to be employed and 80% of those actually are employed at an average annual salary of £26500, then that suggests a total income from possible givers of about £14B/year, hence donations at about 3%.
Most of the figures in the previous paragraph are guesses or poor approximations, so don't take this too seriously. There are in any case considerable demographic and religious differences between the UK and the US.
[EDITED to fix a stupid factor-of-10 error in the middle of a calculation.]
Normal Christians are pressured to give, not to tithe 10%, and most give less than 10%.
Well, the goal is to make it socially unacceptable to donate less than 10%. If it succeeds, presumably it will succeed for Christians just as well as for atheists.
This is because the road to 10% starts at 1%, and the road to 1% starts at donating every week, and the road to donating every week starts at donating once.
Social acceptability is local.
I don't see your point. The road to taking the vow of poverty and donating everything to the church starts in the same place.
Certainly true. Do you think the OP's proposal could lead to pockets of socially-forced tithing and these pockets wouldn't really intersect with the highly-religious communities?
Churches tend to be gradualist organizations, because they want to contain a broad selection of society and they're in it for the long haul. If you don't donate now, that's okay; maybe you'll donate some tomorrow. If you donate some now, that's good; maybe you'll donate more tomorrow. If you donate more now, that's great; maybe you'll donate even more tomorrow.
Habits have power and are hard to shift, and many churches deliberately target the meta-habit of improving your habits slowly for the better.
It is not clear to me, especially because I like definitions of "religious" that focus on practice rather than philosophy (leaving open the possibility of non-theist religions). A humanist organization that, say, meets regularly and has shared values and considers tithing a condition for being a full core member sounds a lot to me like a highly religious community.
So, given that the churches have been doing all this for a long time, I read it as an argument that the current rate of giving is the asymptotic limit for the social technology the churches have been using.
Sure, but in this context we're talking about the social structure of the US (and, in general, Western) society and I'm using the word "religion" in a very conventional meaning.
Agreed. I read the initial suggestion as basically 'get atheists up to the levels of religious charitable giving,' which is why I thought it was silly that a response was 'but that might make the religious give more.'
Sure. I don't think it's that unconventional to refer to, say, UUs as religious, and I expect there to be more secular communities who act like UUs even if they don't self-identify like UUs.
1) Social pressure. Tell people "You ought to do X if you want to be a good person" actually works pretty well, if it comes at them from enough directions. Clearly, I cannot singlehandedly change the culture of a nation, but I can help.
2) Those are not professions associated with high levels of religiosity. And even in the US, less than a third of charitable donations are religious. http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics/
I'm strongly opposed to any scheme that is based on guilt. Social pressure maybe though it has connotations of force. Coaxing maybe though it has connotations of trickery. There are milder forms of pressure and more authentic forms of coaxing I think.
I'm not referring to the social pressure against, say, being gay in 1950. I'm thinking more along the lines of the social pressure against smoking in 1980. It's a clear preference, and everyone know it's a good idea, but you're not shunned for disobeying. (Admittedly, social pressure is really, really hard to calibrate. There's not enough in favour of charity right now, except in the occasional microcosm like LW, but overshooting is possible, and there's several real examples to point to).
Yes, but there's already a crowded marketplace of preachers and institutions doing just that, for different values of X. What is especially persuasive or effective about your message or methodology? Why should we expect it to be more successful than, say, PETA, or the People's Temple?
It's already got presence in mindspace, the basic principles are ones almost everybody agrees with, and unlike other advocacy groups it's non-sectarian - I'd never consider doing what PETA wants because I find them to be loathsome fools, but donating to charity carries no such stigma.
That actually depends on a lot of factors and I would be wary of sweeping generalizations. Attempts to "change the culture" sometimes work, but sometimes backfire. In any case, it's a very slow process.
Also, "social pressure" has a chicken-and-egg problem -- it only works if enough people do it.
So you are comfortable with 1/3 of the "atheist's tithe" going straight to churches (and some additional percentage going to church-affiliated charities)?
Note also that "religion" is by far the largest category of charity recipients, twice as large as the next one (which is "education", aka schools and universities).
1) Agreed. I don't imagine this one backfiring, though it is of course hard to actually do. Still, most of the thing LW sets its mind to are equally hard, so I don't see this as a particular barrier.
2) I suspect it'll be less than that - the religious donate more(which is a big part of why the US is the most generous developed nation), and a lot of them actually do tithe as-is, which means this proposal won't result in them giving any more. But even if it is 1/3, yeah, I'm fine with that. A lot of religious money these days is spent on good works that even an atheist like myself will give props for, and even if it was all wasted, 2/3 of donations will be doing good things.