In the same way that the US does more to help humanity then any other country... the Red Cross is bigger then any one local charity.

When it comes to amount of money vs help...

and amount of money vs sustained help?

Certaintly not... think of all the added expenses of being a large orginization and taking care of food and housing for your employees etc...

Also by sustained help... I mean health that fully sustains someone.

For example, food banks help out those in a city in Cleveland.  In two months time or a two years time... the majority of those families are fine, and plenty can sustain themselves.  10-20 and 30 years from now?  Clevaland and that area is in a better spot.  The economy is better... and there is more money to go into the  economy, and more people to help others both in Cleveland and across the world.

Ship foreign aid food to Somalia via the red cross... in two months, they probably are still living off foreign aid food.  2 Month from now... the same... 10-20-30 years from now... there are just more people requiring help via foreign aid, because of the crappy leadership. (or in somalias case lack of leadership.)  In a way our charity peversly is just causing more people to starve, just over a longer period of time... until we can't provide enough charity to cover everyone... and then... MASSIVE problems happen.  Research generally tends to show foreign aid having little actual effect on the countries... and in some cases... actual negative effects to the economy.

In a lot of cases... the charity may actually be destroying local buisnesses and ruining the infostructure of "less developed" nations.

In both cases, those who don't get money die.

In a lot of cases... foreign aid actually is holding down revolutions that could lead to better government and more prosperity... or if not revolutions... at least reform and focusing on food industries and the like.

In a lot of ways, the foreign aid we apply now, actually causes more longtime harm then good... and that money could be spent on other countries where it would create more good.

Money is spent emotionally and not logically... when it could be used to save more people, both at once... and over the long term.

We could be doing things a lot more efficently and rapidly fixing problems like world hunger a lot better... without more people dieing... just simply by focusing on the changes and people who are likely to benefit.

I'm talking disaster relief aid, where if the people are usually self-sustaining but due to a major event are temporarily not. This doesn't appear to be what you're talking about.

Depends on where the disaster relief is... a lot of times it's in places that couldn't feed people in the first place.

Like the problems in Haiti... which, the relief efforts there were widely considered a failure.

Until there are no homeless or starving people here in America, I refuse to help anyone else.

What makes American lives more important may I ask?

Well, changing laws is obviously not charity work. I had no ideea people actually said stuff like that...

I would love to hear that answer myself as well.

As I said about Canada I'm sure the US is fairly similiar now that the Government is introducing Universal Health Care. The majority of homeless in Canada and probably the US are homeless by choice. Doesn't the US have a good welfare system? What about low income housing? Drug rehab programs? I don't know that much about the US's social services so I can't say for sure.

But Thailand and many other countries have virtually no social services. Those living in the slums are legitimatly poor they don't have a Government helping them. Many of the people I met work all day for less then a dollar.

So what makes an American any more valuable then a poor starving person in Uganda for example? Now Kasz used perhaps the best example he could "Somalia". However even Somalia is beginning to turn around the Government is gaining more control and ten years from now for all we know it could be a self sufficient democracy.

Also how did this convo go from humanitarian missions to aid. Unlike just dropping a pile of rice into a country humanitarian mission usually lasts months to years. My aid team and most of the ones I know go out and teach farming skills, english and reading and writing and how to purify water for drinking. Most of the teams send kids to schools and educate them so that they can make better lives for themselves.

Somalia is a bad example because to my knowledge no sane organisation is sending teams, the last one I heard of got kidnapped. You can't really use a country with no teams as a good example of not needing humanitarian teams.

Many aid organisations like World Vision and YWAM train the locals and in turn bring them out of poverty. I watched a documentary about it happening in Thailand right before I left, so I could get to know the country a bit better. Their was a hill tribe with lots of land but they had no knowledge of farming and the hilltribe was brutally poor. A Canadian realized that this hilltribe was suffering so he went in and taught the tribe how to grow coffee beans. He threw his money behind starting of their first crop. He then helped the tribe by hooking them up with a coffee importer here in Canada. Now the tribe is thriving they are exporting coffee at amazing rates and the man who helped them is doing it all non-profit so almost all of the income goes straight to the tribe. Now they have those cat like animals eating the beans and shitting them out and the tribe is making insaine amounts of money. The kids are now in schools and the outcome for the tribe that was almost starving to death is now one of the wealthiest in Thailand.

Now I don't know if that man was Christian or not the documentary didn't say. But when someone cares and trains the people in a humanitarian mission they can change the lives of hundreds, thousands even millions. Now that guy did not do it with donations he used his own money and went in himself to help the people.

In almost every country on earth their are resources that the people if properly educated can use to generate income. Even in countries like Afghanistan one of the poorest countries on earth. Afghanistan is sitting on huge mineral deposits and if/when the war is over the people could be trained to mine those minerals and lift them out of poverty. Or crops the country is desperatly in need of food, all it will take is to teach the farmers to stop growing Opium (Which is very difficult) and to grow food and whoola.

Even in Africa their are several countries that could produce massive amounts of food, but the people are often uneducated and not capable of farming the land themselves. But if humanitarian teams teach them they could become self sufficient!

Unlike blindly dropping aid dollars into helping a humanitarian mission lets you help people hands on and see where your dollar is going.

I'm actually curious, how many homeless or starving people are there in America?

Growing opium isn't difficult in Afghanistan. It's very easy and very good money. You can be opposed to it morally, but economically it's fantastic for the farmers.

Oh yeah.  It's generally the defense that's brought up based on the surprising fact that on average two things most dictate how much you give to charity.

How conservative you are... and how religious you are.

On average an Religious Conservative is going to give way more money, donate way more time to charity, donate more blood, and everything else... then a Democratic Atheist. 

The actual religion doesn't seem to matter so much as how observant you are... the more observant you are... the more you donate.  This is true even when you eliminate donations to nonsecular orginizations.

On average being the important thing to mention... because there are plenty of atheists who do a lot for charity... it's just there are a lot who don't.