Help me, PZ Myers, and Hemant Mehta Get Tattoos

   If the Foundation Beyond Belief can get 5,400 people on their international team by this Saturday, raising money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society through their Light the Night Walks, Todd Stiefel will get a mohawk and PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta will get tattoos!!!

   Now where may you have heard about this Light the Night Walk before??? Hmmmm... OH, ON THE SIDEBAR TO THE RIGHT!!! :)

   Yours truly is already part of this event and I am captaining a team for the local event in Iowa City on October 13th (just three months away). If you happen to live in the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City areas, you may sign up for my team, which also adds you to the Foundation Beyond Belief list.

   And allow me to up the stakes just a bit... If this goal is met OR if people help me reach my fundraising goal of $500 (also by this Saturday), I will get a tattoo as well!

UPDATE: For people who donate, I will send you pictures and possibly video of me getting the tattoo.

   Sign up HERE (for signing up on my team) or here for a list of national teams or donate on the right!

Libertarians and Charity: A Follow-Up to the Follow-Up

   In my last post on this topic, I discussed what seemed to be liberal hypocrisy in regards to charity, but there was something that just wasn't setting quite right. It turns out to basically be two thing—local phenomenon and decline in giving with decline in need. If there is less of a need for charity, then it is not surprising that people might give less. If you then combine this idea with an idea that people will react more to their local communities as opposed to national needs, you may get a partial explanation of why liberals donate less.

   Take Mississippi, for example. It is generally a conservative state and is quite religious. Therefore we should expect the people of Mississippi to be quite charitable. But Mississippi also seems to have a lot of societal ills. I think they have a high poverty rate and I am quite sure they have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation. So they have a great need for charity. Contrast this with Vermont, which is generally quite liberal. I think Vermont tends to rank fairly well as far as societal health goes. There is then less of a need for charity. So I'm not too worried if people are giving less in Vermont than in Mississippi. Actually, I would expect that!

   But, to be fair, this doesn't completely excuse the issue. There are things like cancer research (like I am helping donate to on the sidebar) that are pretty much a constant across the country. If people in Vermont have less of a local need, then they should probably be compensating that with larger donations to other needs like this. Or, as that article I had linked to last time addressed, liberals give less blood. There really isn't a good reason for this to be the case. So, there still seems to be some bit of hypocrisy, but it may be less than it appears when looking at it from a high level.

Libertarians and Charity: A Follow-Up

   In my last post, I mentioned Susan Jacoby speaking of some statistics on charity based on political alignment. Now, since it was said on a TV panel discussion, no source was given. So I went about doing a Google search to see what I might be able to find. And I found this article from four years ago written by George Will. There are a few interesting things to note in this article, some of which are surprising and others that are not.

• "The single biggest predictor of someone's altruism...is religion."
  
     This is not surprising. If people often go to a place that is asking for 10% of a person's income, potentially including threats of torture in an afterlife (or maybe just claims that they need the money to spread the "Good News" to prevent others from being tortured), then it's not surprising that some of those people will be quite giving. (And if a church doesn't use fear, they always have guilt.) If you don't deal with such an environment, then where is one to get constant reinforcement? Therefore it makes sense that liberal giving would be less. Like the article states, "the percentage of self-described Democrats who say they have 'no religion' has more than quadrupled since the early 1970s." Liberals such as myself have to be our own motivators, and it would appear we are failing at that.
  
     By the way, I should point out that Jacoby claimed that the religious give more to secular charities than do the secularists. So they are not just giving to church (which I don't count as particularly being "charitable"). This article does not address this point. Yet, I wonder how much of that money goes to religious charities that are disguised as secular. For example, if Focus on the Family is considered a charity (I don't know if it is), it would probably be considered "secular," yet many secularists know better. So I'd like to see some deeper investigation on that front. Though secularists still need to do better regardless!


• "The least charitable cohort is a relatively small one -- secular conservatives."
  
     This seems to line up with what Susan Jacoby said in that interview. (Interesting, too, is that George Will himself is part of this group.) It is something that does not personally surprise me, but when you consider this point and the next point together, there seems to be a disconnect.


• "People who reject the idea that 'government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality' give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition."
  
     This in itself isn't surprising. If you think private charity is the better way to go, then you'd better demonstrate your commitment to that idea, which is why I posed a challenge to Libertarians at the end of that last post. However, as I said before, there seems to be a disconnect with the previous point. It has been my impression of secular conservatives that they tend to be part of this group that rejects the idea of government having responsibility. So why are they so horrible at charity? Perhaps my impressions of secular conservatives are wrong; perhaps they are not as against this idea as I think.
  
     What would be nice to see is a breakdown of this group that rejects the idea of government responsibility between religious and secular conservatives. Heck, it may even be a good idea to know how many liberals are in this group. And it would also be very nice to know how many people consider themselves to be libertarians, instead of having a binary breakdown between conservative and liberal (that goes for the entire study). I hope I need not state that politics are more complex than this! (I myself score highly on the social questions on this quiz called the "World's Smallest Political Quiz.")

   The disappointing point about that last point is I would like to see that not be true. Much of the article is to point out liberal hypocrisy. It appears to unfortunately be true. As the article highlights, liberals should be donating to private charity until there are more government programs in place, as promoting such programs alone does nothing for those in need. There's not much else to say other than I am disappointed. Yet, I know one of the first places I need to start is with myself. Otherwise, when I complain about libertarians possibly being more talk than action, it's like the pot calling the kettle black.

Libertarians and Charity

   One area where libertarians (and a lot of conservatives can be included in this discussion as there tends to be a fair amount of overlap in this area) really upset me is in the area of charity. They often act like they are caring, compassionate people. However, their arguments tend to suggest otherwise. The general Libertarian position is that individual people should decide where to donate their money and that government should stay out of the process. An example to the right is from Penn Jillette (who I will refer to on a first-name basis, as that seems to be how he likes to be addressed). This particular statement is a bit more aggressive than typical Libertarian sentiments, but it should help give you an idea what such arguments are like. I'll go into Penn's particular argument later, but for now I'll cover the problems with the general arguments.

I found a new cause!

   I just learned today that Foundation Beyond Belief is a Special Friend of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Light the Night walk. The FBB has a goal of raising $1,000,000 for this cause, with the Todd Stiefel family pledging to match the first $500,000 raised. This would be a great way to send a message to the world that atheists are charitable, moral people, countering the negative stereotypes that are our there. The other thing about this is that my wife, Amy, has had to deal with lymphoma twice in her life. (You can read more at her blog.)

   Please help out by donating to this cause through the widget below or on the right sidebar. The money will help me achieve my goal of $500 and my local team's goal of $2,500. (I've noticed difficulty with the widgets loading. Alternatively, you can visit my fundraising page. Or, you can always donate under Amy's page.)

UPDATE: OK, one problem with the widget is that there can only be one such widget on the page at a time. I have removed the widget from this post so that the one on the sidebar can work.

Hey, Hament's cause got mentioned on TYT!

I just found out today what happened in Bend, Oregon. First, to whoever did that, you made an ass of yourself and could have made an ass out of atheists in general. Thankfully, there are good people like Hament out there to correct your wrongs! Even I would have perhaps donated some money to protect a reputation (if I had heard about this before enough money was raised)! And on that, it pisses me off that atheists who had nothing to do with this have to spend our hard-earned money to fix this! ...(captures breath)...OK, on the positive side, we've received some positive media attention, but I must say the ends do NOT justify the means! It was good to see this on TYT, and I hear Hament will be on "Fox & Friends" this Saturday morning.

To Ana, there is only ONE Flying Spaghetti Monster! All those others are false gods! :) To Cenk, great use of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy at the end! :)

The results are in!

The battle between PZ Myers and other atheist bloggers/media celebrities (for lack of a better word) to raise money for Camp Quest is over! And the winner is the others, with a total of $13,550.06 to $13,016.01 which means Matt Dillahunty will be dressed in drag for not one but two episodes of The Atheist Experience!

Can I take back my donation?

As you may have noticed on the sidebar is a gadget to donate to Camp Quest for PZ Myers' donation team. However, I have just learned through one of Jen McCreight's blog posts that "Matt Dillahunty at The Atheist Experience TV program will do one episode of the show in drag" if Team Awesome, PZ Myers' opponent, wins the donation battle. This makes me wonder if I have misplaced my loyalties with Team PZ. The thought of seeing Matt in drag alone makes me now want to see Team Awesome win, and I frankly do not care what PZ does with his beard. However, I already donated to Team PZ on Thursday, helping him to extend his lead. The question now is can I take back my donation from Team PZ and give it to Team Awesome instead? And maybe I should change my gadget, too!

UPDATE 05/29/2011 16:24: It appears that Team Awesome has now taken a lead over Team PZ! Maybe I'll get to see Matt Dillahunty in drag after all!