Maybe controversial - Religion IS bad, but.....

[Belacqua]

Hey didn't say religion - or the government was good.

Still like America tho.

Lost my job for awhile. Forced to accept charity from a church/government food bank.

Didn't like it at all. No Atheists to help me out then.

You say their charities fail. But I got the food when I needed it.

Life's never perfect.

You said yourself they didn't have the cash etc. on their own so they went to the gov't.

The charity then worked for me so how can I consider them as failing?

Reality can be ugly, not what you want, when you are forced to swallow your pride.

I've been told that atheism is simply a lack of belief in God, and doesn't necessarily carry with it any ethical beliefs. So if atheists do charity, it will be because of some positive belief they have -- for example, the feeling that they have an ethical commitment to their community, or sympathy for people who are less well-off. 

Getting from the feeling of an ethical commitment to an efficient infrastructure for charity requires a few more steps. And none of these things is atheist per se, because people who lack belief may or may not feel charitable. It's not an integral consequence of having a lack. 

So depending on where you are, the best charity might be secular, but it won't be atheist. Oxfam is an example. In America it's not uncommon for atheists to participate in charities organized by religious people, simply because that's where the infrastructure is. 

(Where I live, in Japan, there is very little Christian proselytizing or debate about specific beliefs. All of the Christians I have known here joined the church because of its history of charitable work. Christians set up the first kindergartens, for example, and for a long time ran the only women's colleges. The image of "what Christians do" is fundamentally based on their charitable work.)

For quite a long time, European and American culture were rooted in Christianity, and our ethics still reflect that. Obviously many Christians have failed to live up to Christian ideals. (Because human beings often fail to live up to their ideals.) But if we're looking for secular institutions to take over for the work that religious institutions traditionally did, it's apparently going to take a while longer. 

Ronald Reagan, unfortunately, popularized the belief that government is always the problem, and that private organizations always do a better job. This is not always true, but it has become a common assumption among many people, including some Democrats. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when politicians underfund governmental agencies on the assumption that they won't do a good job even if they have sufficient funds. This means that many people start out with an ideological objection to secular government charities, and just assume that non-governmental groups will step in. So again, it's Christian groups which have traditionally done this. How much better they could have done it, in an ideal world, I don't know.