There is no way to help everyone all of the time. We only ever have limited resources, and yes, we should work to keep ourselves being in need too.

Why? Because it would be an endless cycle – you give away, but to such an extent that you yourself become needy, and then no problems get solved, they just get moved to a different group, who are then helped out to the extent that the helpers now need help, and so on. Helping people is to help stop or minimise suffering and need, doing it to the extent that you yourself become needy kind of breaks the point.

Then of course the idea of helping being purely about money is naive – from simple things like helping someone move in next door, or actually becoming a missionary in person are other ways, possibly more impactful ways of helping than donating money, especially when you consider how much money when simply given anonymously to charities might only end up in helping quell administrative expenses rather than actually helping.

It’s about finding a balance – between what is within your reach in what you can do whilst remembering to also take care of yourself. If you don’t, then to some degree it becomes pointless because again, it’ll just become a cycle and nothing really changes. Help from those who can, sympathy and help for those that can’t.

Jesus gives a practical example in the Good Samaritan story of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.

…that may be true that someone doesn’t want an iPhone, but nobody can deny that a starving person would want food… and there are certainly plenty of starving people. So how can one justify buying anything “extra” for oneself when that money can be used to buy food for someone in need? If you were to treat someone as a priority over you, I assume that if you were starving to death, you’d want someone to “put you first” in denying a luxury for himself and using that money to keep you alive.

No. That goes against the teaching. This very post shows that – you can help the world and it’s people, for the sake of personal gain (both now and in the after life) and for the sake of boasting, but they mean nothing without love, and by extension, without true meaning and a genuine desire to help.

Doing so purely in the favour of a reward is exactly that, and thinking both Heaven and current life as purely that the same also. There is no guarantee no matter how strong your belief is, and even if God were to be true, even in that there is no guarantee that anything good that happens to you is purely a reward.

Therefore it is naive to act purely for reward, and as shown by this very blog post, against it’s own teachings, as they would be without love, merely desire and possibly greed.

Certainly one can take this to an extreme and live in poverty while you give service to the poor, sick or homeless, or one can give all of one’s money to charity. In the real world this isn’t desirable or practical, by performing small acts according to time and means is more than accessible to most people.

The question that bothers me with a religious rather than humanist approach to good acts is one of motivation. Surely it is better, at least more noble and, dare I say, more moral, to love one’s neighbour without the prospect of reward, than to do so in the belief that it will win favour with your chosen deity?

An iPhone may be a treat for you, but it would be an unwanted gift/waste of money for me. So you may think you’re “loving” me as you would yourself by treating me to an iPhone (just because you want an iPhone), but you’d actually be just throwing an expensive piece of electronics at me that I wouldn’t use.