M
member 1013
Guest
Yes, we know you hate organized religionsI hear what you're saying, but religious groups don't have a monopoly on that sort of thing.
I'm anti-religion, but I'm closing in on 50 blood/plasma donations. Nobody pays me for that, I don't need to be guilt tripped or threatened with eternal damnation.
I've lived through multiple serious earthquakes that caused everyday life for everybody in the city to stop dead in its tracks. Couldn't drink the water without boiling it. Had to shit in the garden, or in a bucket. Couldn't take a shower for a week. Food supply chains destroyed, as well as access roads to entire neighbourhoods. Entire suburbs written off and left abandoned.
People came out for each other, and they didn't need religion to do it. They checked on their elderly neighbours and helped each other. In the days and weeks following the earthquake, the major humanitarian /aid organisation wasn't a religious group. It was the Student Volunteer Army, and it sprang into existence within hours of the quake. Thousands of university students and recent graduates went door to door checking on people and cleaning thousands and thousands and thousands of tonnes of wet, stinking silt out of people's living rooms and off the streets.
They organised food drives and fresh water stations with clean, safe water sourced from wells. All of this appeared to fill a desperate need. Nobody got paid, nobody passed a collection bucket. These people aren't religious, there was no spiritual component to this. My girlfriend at the time had Celiacs, so as soon as the power came back on she spent a day baking gluten-free bread, biscuits and cakes, and then we dropped them off at a SVA centre.
You don't need fairy tales to have charity. In fact, in many ways traditional Abrahamaic religion gets in the way of charity, because of how morally backwards and tribal it tends to be.
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