Studies Show Bible Belt States Are Most Charitable (translation, Mormon, Baptist)
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Good point. I remember a 60 minutes piece a few years ago that showed how crooks were easily getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraudulent Medicare claims. All they had to do was create a fake business. One guy said he was raking in like 50K a week.
If our government ran a business, it would crash and die within a month. Little oversight and responsible spending.
Churches do have to pay the bills to keep running. And they have to keep running in order to perform local ministries like running food pantries or going to visit the sick, elderly or people in the hospitals.
Even if you try to dilute the charity stats by claiming that the money going to churches isn't true charity, it still doesn't take away from the fact that outside the Bible belt, people are not very giving at all. They are self serving.
That's because the LARGE majority of it isn't charity, and doesn't go to charitable activities. Essentially, your link is garbage if it takes into account church offerings. Take that out of the equation, and then let's see who has the most giving. Hint: It wouldn't be the south.
Another problem with a lot of these things, is that they take into account things like "percentage of income given to charity". You may not think that is a problem, but let's think about it....
Someone in Mississippi gives 2,000 and they make 30k, that is 6.6% of income.
Someone in Massachusetts gives 3,000 and they make 60k, that is only 5%, but they still gave more money. Their cost of living is also much greater than backwards MS, which has a big impact on how much you can give.
Point is, these things are not very accurate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Last edited by southernbored; 06-08-2016 at 03:45 PM..
Speak English. It has NOT been refuted here. One person (or maybe more than one) has expressed a differing opinion. That is not refuting.
It certainly has been refuted here, as it was all the other times , and if you wish to correct my English be specific instead of just a mouthy nitwit making a generic claim .
I grew up in the South, (Houston, TX), and can assure you that our generosity and friendly nature has nothing to do with religion...it's just the culture of the South.
Most people from the South will go out of their way and even give you the shirt of their back to help out a poor unfortunate soul. That's the way it's always been during my time there.
It's just good ole Southern Hospitality and it goes way back! Southern Hospitality
Even if you try to dilute the charity stats by claiming that the money going to churches isn't true charity, it still doesn't take away from the fact that outside the Bible belt, people are not very giving at all. They are self serving.
That's a very presumptuous and uncharitable view.
There are many ways to give. You probably see 0-2% of income given and see the zero and not the two, and then assume that people don't donate in other ways than monetarily. In my community in one of those 0-2% areas there are a lot of people who don't have the means to give much $$ but give generously of their time. Volunteer work is huge here. So is activism. People sacrifice in the ways that they can for the causes that they care about.
In point of fact the wealthy (well not so much the top 1%, but the people just below that for sure) give quite generously and the increasingly rare bird called the "middle class" and the poor, including the working poor, give of their time to do the implementation work. Wealth (and with it, the ability to give) is so concentrated at the top that I suspect the figures are quite misleading because they're overall averages.
You could walk into some Texas towns with nothing and people will take you in, give you a job and a car and help you do anything.
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