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Sunday, August 24, 2008

Charity Without Morality

...leads to what?

The Bible is full of strict rules for behavior (how horrid!). It's also full of admonitions to forgive and act kindly to one another (yay!). Can you separate the two? What happens if you donate money without moral guidance to people who immerse themselves in this:


Don't you end up with more of this:
Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes...

A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal—in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance...

My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among my patients, or indeed in the country as a whole. The father of her first child had been violent, and she had left him; the second died in an accident while driving a stolen car; the third, with whom she had been living, had demanded that she should leave his apartment because, a week after their child was born, he decided that he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.) She had nowhere to go, no one to fall back on, and the hospital was a temporary sanctuary from her woes.
It goes on and on with descriptions of her life, her mother's life, her kids' lives...

Is charity without morality truly charitable?

2 comments:

  1. Well, giving addicts money to support their addiction...kills them.

    Ugh.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:33 AM

    But they will thank you for it. Years ago (when I was about 19 or so), I was accosted by a guy in the street who wanted money "for food". The thing is, we were right in front of the liquor store at the time, so he wasn't fooling anybody. This was the first time this had happened to me, and I didn't know how to get rid of him, so I gave him the change in my pocket (about a dollar). He thanked me, and called me a "good Christian". I wanted to yell after him, "No, you fool, if anything I just did Satan's work!"

    I still feel bad about giving him the money.

    ReplyDelete