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Vaniver comments on The Atheist's Tithe - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.