Categories
Blog

On altruism part 2

In the spirit of holidays and sharing is caring, an update to my other post with some more interesting organizations to support:

1) Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you havn’t watched this then do it now. Then you’ll know why they are important, more now than ever.

2) Mozilla. I can’t think of another program I have spend so much time using over the last many years. Their support is important in order to remain independent and make the web a better place.

3) Randers regnskov  This is a Danish one, but a rather important one I think. They pay for school to an indian tribe in Ecuador, and in response the families will not sell their rain forest land to big international companies. What a great idea and really worth spreading.

Categories
Blog

On altruism

Some years ago I became an apostate by leaving the church and became a “real” atheist. In Denmark the church and the state are still quite heavily intertwined. Luckily the biggest portion of the money the church receives are from believers who pay about 1% of their annual salary through a special church tax. Many of these never go to church, except for Christmas, when they get married or when they get children and need to get them baptized. What would happen if they spend that money on charity instead?

I have been thinking about ways to spend some of the money I don’t have to pay the church for altruistic purposes. So far I have donated to three different causes that I think makes the world a better place.

1) Wikipedia

We need to nurture and make sure that information in the public domain stays there and are available to anyone with an internet connection free of charge.

2) Khan Academy

I have always been interested in how we can improve the education system and now being a father certainly helps me appreciate any progress being done in this area. Salman Khan tells their story in this TED talk much better than I can do.

3) Global Witness

There are a wealth of different organization trying to help the poor in need, but I always find them lacking in that they seem to focus on individuals rather than looking at the bigger picture. When I watched Charmian Gooch talk about global corruption I instantly felt that this was finally something worth supported and something I could see really make a difference in the long run.