longweekend58 wrote on Apr 15
th, 2014 at 5:39pm:
Schu wrote on Apr 15
th, 2014 at 5:16pm:
It's got nothing to do with moral superiority.
It has to do with not giving money to organisations that are dishonest and untrustworthy and that use at least a proportion of that money to further their own power structure not so they can more effectively help people but so they can more effectively further their own ends.
If someone asks me for money I expect them to be able to answer my questions and challenges to them.
When these organisations properly clean themselves up and can demonstrate that they actually place their principles of helping people about their own ends I will reconsider my position. At the moment if I was to give them money I would be contributing to the perpetration of possible crimes and their cover-up. I do not want my money used to build homes for children where they may well end up abused.
there are no childrens homes anymore and haven't been for decades. Ive hear these arguments all before and you are nothing new. You just don't want to give and this is what you think is a nice convenient excuse.
Heard it all from bentnail about church groups 'only' passing on 95% of donations and using 5% in overhead while ignoring non-church groups that take 50%.
Heard it all before and it is always invariably lame. But the 'building childrens homes' is at least a new - if still fallacious - excuse.
You know nothing of how much I give of my resources to help others, so it's rather presumptuous of you to suggest that this is merely an excuse not to give. But nice way to attempt to shame me.
Moreover, I apply the same rigorous checks to any organisation that asks me for money. It baffles me that charities of any sort expect donations without often being willing to explain themselves. Reputation, as we now know, is quite often an illusion.
As for the comment about children's homes, whilst I might have expressed it inaccurately, it is not an inaccurate point. The Salvos do provide shelters for women and children and in those shelters there are times when the women leave the children in the care of the workers. Now if the Salvos had come clean about their abuse instead of trying to cover it up and only begrudging accept the bare minimum of responsibility when required to I would have had faith that they would take any and all measures in the future to prevent other harm. But they didn't so I have no confidence in them doing the right thing now.
I treat all organisations the same way. It just so happens that I knew about the Salvos before it was in the public domain and while many others were under the illusion they were different. When an organisation has nothing to hide they are very forthcoming about their practices and they can demonstrate what they have done when an individual has done the wrong thing.
There are plenty of non-denominational organisations around that do just the same work as the denominational ones without the same proportion of money being siphoned off to further the denomination itself. It is also the case that when people are out to do the wrong thing they tend to gravitate to environments where they will be protected and that culture still exists with denominational organisations. There are plenty of independent womens' shelters and homeless shelters, international aid organisations and counselling services.
I will still go with my original observation. I've heard it all before and when pushed the answer is almost always the same "I don't give at all or very sparingly".
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