Rating: WARTY!
This book purports to show how charity backfires by inducing people to employ it as a permanent crutch instead of it actually being used to get them back on their feet. I can understand that. It’s like that tired old adage that if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day (assuming that their dietary needs are narrow and minimal and they have no dependents!), but if you teach them how to fish, you feed them for life. That, of course assumes they have a fishing ground nearby, and they can afford the inevitable license to fish there (along with a rod and any other necessary equipment)! LOL!
I would have had less trouble with this book's premise if it had not had two major problems. The first and worst was that it relied entirely on authorial anecdote, and there were no references whatsoever to support even those. All we got was personal stories in which the author was always the hero, and vague allusions to newspaper reports, not one of which was supported by any dates. This made the book worthless. In one or two cases where there were enough details to check up on, I found the truth not to be quite the stark black and white picture the author had painted.
My other issue was that this was told from a Christian religious perspective - about church charities. Nothing else was covered, and frankly those I read of here didn’t seem to be the best-run or best-organized services. There was another angle to the religious proselytizing, too, which can be exemplified by asking: why have religious charities at all? The author never addressed this. The answer seems obvious, but if you look at this from a religious perspective, you can see how faithless the charities are.
The Bible explicitly states in the NT that if you ask for something in Jesus's name, it will be granted. There is no small print, There are no ifs, ands, or buts. There are no conditions specified. Ask and it will be given; knock and it will be opened to you. Yet nowhere does this author address why prayer has failed so badly that we need to have charities. The age of miracles curiously disappeared with the last of the Bible writers. None have been seen since. Yes, there are claims for miracles, but none which can withstand dispassionate investigation.
This author's entire oeuvre seems to be taking an obscure, unreferenced, unverifiable anecdote and generalizing from it to grandiose conclusions. He talks of Janine, apparently a single mom trying to get back on her feet, who turned out to be a scam artist. From this he concludes that all such cases are suspect and we can't give them a thing without making them pay. Now I don't doubt that there are scam artists, but my guess is that they are the minority of the ostensibly needy. Besides, what does this author's Bible say? Does it say "Vet everyone and make 'em pay," or does it say give everything you have and follow Jesus? The auhtor is failing in his Christian duty every bit as much as "Janice" is.
This author brings nothing new to the table - there is nothing he discusses here which isn't already known - and widely known to those who care to ask about these things. I gave up on this book precisely because the author evidently thinks his audience is both ignorant and stupid not to know (or at least to suspect) these things. He had nothing new to offer and evidently could find no shades of grey anywhere, which is suspicious in itself. I cannot recommend it.
