Let me go back to the very basic question that everyone skips. We hear that people been trying to find out whether being religious is likely to make you more generous. Why have they been trying to find that out? Why do they imagine that being religious might make people more generous? Where did that idea even come from?

No one studies the question of whether playing blackjack is likely to make you more generous. No one wonders whether surfing, or hunting, or delivering the mail, or DJing is likely to make you more generous. No one studies whether being a scientist, an actor, a chef, a police officer, or a cheerleader is likely to make you more generous. No one has ever suggested that any of those activities might have that marvelous effect. Where does the idea come from that religion might do it?

The claim comes from religion itself. One of the central tenets of almost every religion is that you can’t be a really good person unless you become a member. For about five thousand years, people who want us to be religious – and this mostly means people who make their living from religion – those people have been telling us that religion makes people good. And why do they make this claim? Is it because there they have seen overwhelming evidence for it? That cannot be the reason. We know it cannot be the reason because religions claim such moral benefits as soon as they are created, long before the claim could have been tested.

The reason they say that religion makes people more generous is that they are selling a product, and they want us to believe that the product does great things. We want to be happy, so they say religion makes you happy. We’re afraid of death, so they say religion can prevent it. And we want to be good, so they say religion makes you good. That’s how they sell the product: by telling us that it will assuage our needs – no matter what those needs are. There has never been a reason to take such claims seriously.

Here’s a famous question about religion and atheism, as expressed in an anonymous letter to the National Review.

Let’s see, we have scores of Baptist Hospitals, Method [sic] Hospitals, Jewish Hospitals, Catholic Hospitals, etc., etc. Each of these have ‘outreach’ programs both here and in the most dismal places on earth, staffed with dedicated medical doctors and nurses. Where oh where are the Atheist’s hospitals, or soup kitchens?

One answer to this question is to ask, as Doug Ittner of American Atheists does: In what way are “religious” hospitals religious? Do they, for example, offer all their treatments for free, as Jesus would have done?

In America, as of 1999, 13% of all hospitals were religious (totaling 18% of all hospital beds); that’s 604 out of 4,573 hospitals…. Despite the religious label, these so-called religious hospitals are more public than public hospitals. Religious hospitals get 36% of all their revenue from Medicare; … they get 12% … from Medicaid. Of the remaining 44% of funding, 31% comes from county appropriations, 30% comes from investments, and only 5% comes from charitable contributions (not necessarily religious). The percentage of Church funding for Church-run hospitals comes to a grand total of 0.0015 percent.

Secondly, consider this. Do Baptist hospitals use Baptist medicine? Not if they want their customers to survive. There is no magical religious medicine that religious hospitals can use, so in terms of medical knowledge, technology and practice, a hospital cannot be better just because it is “religious.” But it can be worse! Ittner again:

Despite being publicly funded … many Catholic hospitals refuse to provide infertility treatments, birth control, abortion, and emergency contraception to rape victims…. Catholic hospitals have … policies preventing euthanasia (whereby a terminally ill patient must be kept on life support despite the patient’s demands to end treatment)…. Mormon hospitals will refuse sterilization to women who have had less than five children or are younger than 40 years of age. Southern Baptist hospitals won’t provide abortion services.

So, there’s nothing particularly religious about religious hospitals, except for the fact that they’ll sometimes refuse to help you. Especially if you’re female.

Ittner concludes that

The answer to the question “How many American hospitals have atheists built?” is “All of them.”

There is a third way to see how misleading this question about “atheist hospitals” is. The following was contributed by an anonymous poster at Positive Atheism:

Churches asking where are the non-theists’ charities? This is a meaningless question, a semantic trick, a red herring, a blind alley we should not be drawn into. There are various musicians’ association charities; why no Non-Musicians’ Charity? There are many black charities; why no Non-Black Charity? There’s a Gardener’s Scholarship Fund; why no Non-Gardeners’ Fund? … Non-theists, along with non-musicians, non-blacks, non-gardeners, contribute as individuals according to their interests, skills, and philosophies.

As is usual in the field of religion, the solution to the problem is to notice that the question itself is badly constructed. We have to keep reminding ourselves that religion does this. It gets us asking the wrong questions. This is one of its defining features. It is designed to confuse.