"Irreverent" online atheists donate $180,000+ to charity

CIS · #1 by **CIS** » Dec 09, 2011 10:10 pm

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/ ... EL20111209

Dec. 9 (Reuters) — Atheist bloggers have shown their charitable side by swarming to donate money to Doctors Without Borders, in what turned into the humanitarian agency's biggest online fundraiser.

Doctors without Borders (DWB), also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, gets about 4,000 hits on its U.S. website on an average Sunday. Last Sunday that number ballooned to 50,000 as a horde of redditors, subscribers to the social media site reddit.com, thundered across the DWB homepage.

Thousands more clicked through from the atheism sub-reddit, a site normally given over to finding holes in religions and picking fights with creationists, and headed for a dedicated site at firstgiving.com, where they have so far given $180,000.

"It's amazing, what's going on. The amount being raised is amazing, definitely," said Natalie Favre, an MSF spokeswoman in Geneva. "We don't control any of this."

Many donations were tagged with messages such as "Because god won't", "Good without god" or even "Good without Zeus".

Love those last quotes! :smoke:

So proud of the nontheistic community! Anyone from here subscribe to r/atheism? It's a great place to browse.

HughMcB · #2 by **HughMcB** » Dec 09, 2011 10:16 pm

Wild Weasel · #3 by **Wild Weasel** » Dec 12, 2011 9:12 am

The Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics and Freethinkers Team is also the largest lender of the Micro-finance organisation Kiva:

http://www.kiva.org/community

$5,729,450 as of today.

WW

trubble76 · #4 by **trubble76** » Dec 12, 2011 9:20 am

Hmmm but the atheists are giving with no threat of eternal punishment hanging over them, no intoxicating promises of eternal grace in heaven. It must be the devil guiding these militant god-haters to help their fellow man. :ask:

I'm With Stupid · #5 by **I'm With Stupid** » Dec 12, 2011 11:22 am

Yeah, but they're donating to an evil, commie French organisation. They probably even provide contraception.

jaygray · #6 by **jaygray** » Dec 12, 2011 11:48 am

trubble76 wrote:Hmmm but the atheists are giving with no threat of eternal punishment hanging over them, no intoxicating promises of eternal grace in heaven. It must be the devil guiding these militant god-haters to help their fellow man.

No, we just want their children in return so that we can feed them to Richard Dawkins.

DoctorE · #7 by **DoctorE** » Dec 12, 2011 11:51 am

I never tell anyone when I give to charity...

andrewk · #8 by **andrewk** » Dec 17, 2011 10:21 pm

Never telling anyone when you give to charity is the traditional approach, and for some reason is considered in many parts of western society to be more virtuous. But Peter Singer argues in "The Life You Can Save" that there is no rational foundation for such a view. He argues that it is better to tell people when you give, as that will be more likely to encourage them to give as well. I find this argument compelling.