We have just become the number 2 team in terms of amount of money loaned and we are about to become (or may be in a few minutes) the biggest group in terms of members!! Good work everyone.
I did a little investigation on the number of Kiva lenders who have joined a team. This is not a scientific analysis but just some estimates based on what I dug up. There are approximately 334,000 Kiva lenders. I added up the number of team members on the first 15 pages of the community area and then added 20 members for each of the remaining 80 pages. Based on this there are approximately 6015 Lenders who have joined a team (this does not take into consideration that people may be members of more than 1 team).
Our team has 360 members. So our team represents 6% (360/6015) of all team lenders. Unitarians are 1.1% (67/6015), Flying Spaghetti Monsters are 0.5% (31/6015) and all other religious teams combined are (115/6015) 1.9%. There is no way to know if this is reflective of the whole Kiva community, and clearly not everyone lends based on their religious beliefs, but our numbers surely are impressive.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a moderate Christian friend of mine where he said religious people give more to charity. I think the work we are doing here has drawn that old idea into question!
By Peter
It’s Moving Day for the Friendly Atheist Blog
2 years ago
3 comments:
From a percentage comparison, poorer people give more money than rich people - regardless of belief system. Just a side note...
When you look up actual statistics it appears people of faith do give more money (I just did random google searches and that's what I found). Some of it may be due to pressure or trying to assuage some guilt. At any rate, they do give a higher percentage (although most of the stats I found were for Christians so I'm not sure on other faiths. Also, a lot of Christians would have a problem in publicly displaying how much money they give as it's somewhat like bragging. They would probably use Matthew chapter 6 as their reasoning. At any rate, I think an atheist group will be larger on Kiva because I think atheists and other non-religious folk feel a little marginalized about how they are good people too. They have more to prove (at least it seems that you do - after reading your post). I think most Christians would rather join a group that represents the area they live or not join a group at all. At any rate, I even think it's silly and unnecessary to join a group and that is why I won't be joining any atheist group on Kiva.
I think also a lot of religious people already have established methods of charity giving - TEAR Fund collection boxes in church, and suchlike. That's another part of the community aspect of religion we miss out on.
Hurrah for the Atheists! I invest on behalf of my group, Ethical Culture Society of Silicon Valley, and we are mostly all atheists. Since our belief is not about whether or not we believe in god, but more about our relationships and how we live our lives we don't focus on our belief. Nontheless we are in essence a part of the atheist's that contribute to make the world a better place. Rock on folks! I'm so proud of you!
And brian, it doesn't matter what group you join, what matters is that you want to make the world a better place too!
As far as religious charities are concerned - yes, there are a lot of them and many of them are very sketchy. Just read some of the statistics on Charity Navigator, it's an eye opener. Lot's of charities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw benefits for the rich and in turn take in a fraction of what they spend.
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