Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?

So inasmuch as possible, we'll need real world meetings : humans are social beings, and it was customary to see, hear, touch, smell even, people who'd be in your group in the environment of adaptation. Do we have any rationalist bonfire in preparation ? Excursions ? Doing sport together ? Watching films ?

It's pretty difficult to bond as strongly - and more importantly, as richly - to other people if you don't meet them in real life. That bond is what makes us work together so well, what can oil a well working machine. Families, groups of - real life - friends, are not uncommonly the starting point for successful ventures.

And I think it's not just the meeting in real life part. We need to build up a link, to feel the presence of the other, as another human being, as we would a friend. We need to share activities outside of just meeting an planning stuff.

We need to get to know and like each other on that fundamental level, by using the goddamn social machinery that's in our head. We're human beings before being rationalists, and we need to use that to our advantage, down to the last bit of it, rather than constantly forgetting about that fact. We run on corrupt hardware, we aren't rational, disembodied pristine minds. If we deprive ourselves, as well as our community, from that social background, then we will not thrive, and may even wither.

Side question, do we have anything secular, not religious, that looks like religious institutions ? Like, non religious monasteries where people would study, work together, live together ? The closest thing I can think of is the academia, but the academia doesn't seem like what I have on my mind.

What about religious feasts, celebrations, rituals even ? Do we have a lot of non religious rituals around, that could be recuperated, or at least inspire us ? We could use that, at least on a human level, it'd help foster people's willpower, brighten the fire inside. So long as we can direct that energy towards rational goals, and keep watch for any sign of becoming cult-ish, couldn't we benefit from such things ?

And I do care strongly about victims of torture and war. I care about those trapped in dead-end countries or existences, who can't move to seek a better life. I care about the future of myself and the rest of humanity.

Corny to say it, but it's true.

The reason Catholics are better organized than humanists is that they're official, communal, and hierarchical and we're not. The reason cults are better organized than Catholics is that they're even more official, communal, and hierarchical.

If the Pope says "Donate ten percent of your money to me," then there's an expectation that ordinary Catholics will obey. They've committed to following what the Pope says.

If you, Eliezer, posted on this forum "Please donate ten percent of your money to the Institute That Must Not Be Named", well...actually, I don't know what would happen. A few rare people might do it to signal that we liked you. But although we often follow you, we are not your followers. We haven't made a committment to you. We associate with you as long as it's convenient for us, but as soon as it stops being convenient, we'll wander off.

If you really want to get an infrastructure as powerful as the Catholic Church, you need to ask us to officially swear loyalty to you and start publically self-identifying as Rationalists with a capital R (the capital letter is very important!) You need to put us through some painful initiation ritual, so we feel a commitment to stick around even when the going gets tough. You need to make us publically profess how great Rationalism is to all our friends enough times that it would be a major social embarrassment to get kicked out for not obeying you enough. You need to establish a norm that following Eliezer's requests is so completely expected it would be strange to refuse and we'd be going against all our friends. And then you need to keep telling us about how much better off we are as capital-R Rationalists than as members of the boring old general public. Then you can start ordering us to donate ten percent of our income and expect Pope-level compliance rates.

The cultists do all of this, and the Catholics try but generally fail, which is why many Catholics don't listen to the Pope nearly as much as atheists think. If you didn't want to go quite this far, even making us pay $5 for a (physical, laminated, colorful) Less Wrong membership card would probably make a difference. Once we did that, we'd be members of something, instead of people who came to a blog every so often to discuss an interest. The brain cares a lot about this sort of thing.

[edit: better explanation below in response to ciphergoth]

We should not underestimate the power of rational thinking for getting the most out of each charity dollar (or unit of effort). Maybe you've heard of charities that give people's old clothes to poor parts of Africa; while this makes people feel good, it has flooded the markets with dirt-cheap clothing, destroying the local textile industry and contributing to the very poverty that the well-meaning donors seek to alleviate.

This is what impresses me about groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: they focus on things that are less glamorous but probably more useful, like providing basic financial services in poor areas, or doing R&D on how to make good public health cheaper. This is the kind of thing that can make a difference in the long term, and lead to exponentially growing ripple effects. Charity can be a lot more effective if you spend your resources with your head, not your heart.

On Kiva the group that has donated the most money is the "Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious" group.

I don't want to become a "cleaning up this world"-bot. I have my own goals and aims in life, and they are distinct from the goal of "producing as much positive utility for humanity" as possible. I'd rather spend £99 out of every £100 on myself than give it to a random poor person in the third world, because I am more important than s/he is (more important in the subjective, antirealist sense). If anyone here really is a totally dedicated altruist, (in the sense of weighing the welfare of the other 6*10^9 people on the planet equally to your own) then I pity you, but I'm glad you exist.

In general, this problem is not soluble, i.e. you can't get a pound worth of altruism from a penny worth of desire to help strangers, at least without the kind of mind-control strategies that religion employs. But we've already decided we don't want to do that.

However, in the special case of accelerating technology and the singularity, the problem is soluble, because even 1% of the optimizing ability of an FAI is enough to lift the third world from poverty to paradise.

Apologies for going off topic - but I couldn't really avoid it...

Perhaps part of the reason rationalists can't be "aimed" at certain charities even by our self-chosen objects of admiration is that we consider their instructions overrideable without moral cost. If Random Catholic X believes that the Pope delivers the infallible will of God, then anything Random Catholic X does that disobeys the Pope - regardless of his specific situation, assuming the Pope doesn't explicitly exclude people in that situation - is wrong. It's not necessarily that Random Catholic X is thinking occurently about the possibility that he will go to Hell for disobeying, it's that he has no avenue out.

Whereas Random Rationalist Y - I present myself as an example - admires other rationalists for at least partially cognized good reasons. If I have better reasons for doing something other than that which is recommended to me by Eliezer or Dawkins or whoever is making requests of me, than I do for listening to the person in the first place, I am unlikely to follow the suggestion. After all, I don't believe any such person was chosen by God, I don't believe they're infallible, and I also think that there are many individual features of my situation which are relevant and of which such people are generally ignorant. In short, if I have reasons to aim myself differently than the leaders of the rationalist community would like to aim me, I can override their authority without feeling bad about it.

For in-person meeting, can I suggest the vehicle of the Ethical Culture Society? If the idea is benevolent output, the fact that its primary shtick isn't rationalism shouldn't matter. The trouble is there aren't very many chapters; I can't attend one although I want to, because they're all too far away. But they already exist, and more could be started.

(As a side note, I recommend Kiva for efficient charity. It's a microloan site instead of a direct donation, so you can recycle the same contribution indefinitely after you get paid back or even withdraw it if you have to. It also contributes in a way that allows long-term sustainability instead of just throwing beans and rice at a population, because the recipients of loans have businesses that they expand and then use the income therefrom to return the money. And paying anything to the overhead of Kiva itself is explicit and optional.)

I apologize for the criticism, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying.

However, I want to point out that donating money (and therefore, asking for money) is a somewhat dangerous habit to get into, because it is so very, very fungible (the very essence of fungibleness). I think this is why people sometimes do canned-food drives - even with the weird inefficiencies of collecting and sending canned food instead of money, there's more trust that the money isn't being quietly (or accidentally) diverted into "self-sustaining" efforts - like asking for more money.

In your rhetoric, could you please use more variety - not just money, but also other goods like volunteering time, or a mix of time and money?

Eliezer wrote, "Really, I suspect that what's going on here has less to do with the motivating power of eternal damnation, and a lot more to do with the motivating power of physically meeting other people who share your cause."

I think this observation strikes very close to the heart of the matter. People will tell you they attend Catholic mass, for example, for any number of reasons, most of which are probably not available to introspection, but which actually relate to our functioning as social animals. People are motivated to meet other people, and church attendance is one of the few remaining outlets for this tendency. Whether the rationale for congregating is to uphold some deep cause is almost beside the point for the majority. Certainly there will be some for whom some cause is salient and pressing; they are the visible and the vocal, not the representative.

It is perhaps tempting to offer up Catholicism as a proxy for Christianity, and Christianity as a proxy for religion. Bear in mind, though, that Western and Eastern Christianity do not even agree on when to celebrate their holiest day, Easter. Then there are some rather yawning doctrinal disparities between Protestant sects and Roman Catholicism, and even then within itself. There is a growing movement among Catholics to have the mass recited to them in Latin. A prototypical rationalist might call this practice an example of willful obscurantism and worshipping ignorance, but that would be incorrect. It seems unlikely that the point is to comprehend the words of a dead language, but rather to use the setting as a means of priming a type of experience that William James was talking about.

In addition to Yvain's catalogue of Catholics being communal, hierarchical, and official, one could add socially reinforcing. If your co-religionist is giving 10% of his income to support church activities, and you know this is true (it's easy to find out), then there is social pressure not to be a slouch when it comes to tithing--a phenomenon of competition in terms of signaling commitment to cooperative behavior. Would rationalists would ever do that?

The Mormon Church has much higher compliance rates on tithing and gets a lot more out of its followers than Catholicism. They have Church-only welfare systems and other practical benefits conditional on membership, require spouses and family to turn their backs on those who leave, censor/forbid 'dangerous' information, have followers go on long missionary trips to make belief more of their identity, etc.

In general, I don't think you should view tithing in the face of strong Dark Side techniques as really voluntary charitable giving: people give more because of the pressure, and the religious organizations want to do visible 'good works' (other than paying priests and for temple construction) for recruiting and retention purposes.

On the Wiki page for Ego Depletion linked above, there's an interesting aside. A "positive mood stimulus" like an unexpected gift or a comedy movie clip seems to be able to restore people's depleted self control reserves.

One short-term solution I can see helping with this problem is to have rationalists cluster closer together. This already happens indirectly, when geographic locations are occupied by organizations and cultures that attract or require people with a higher-than-average rate of rationalism. We could encourage this on different scales, clustering in cities, regions, or even in neighborhoods and houses. My housemates and I are already doing this. We collect the more interesting, motivated, insightful people we meet, mostly from the university, and integrate them into our social network. Occasionally we invite them to move in with us. On a slightly longer timescale (2 months - 2 years), we have been discussing moving into a larger house with more people. It is a slow process, but we are seeing progress.

We have managed to collect a group of 4-5 around classes and hectic life events in just under two years. While this is still too small a number to draw any firm conclusions, the rate of acquisition seems to be increasing, and I strongly suspect it will further accelerate the more people we have.

As to meeting - one thing the various religious meetings aren't, is one big argument. If you're going to have rationalists meet to develop a community, there ought to be a driving purpose, something to achieve with the time besides disagree with each other. Perhaps a "virtual dojo"? Someone has to start building the "martial art", it isn't going to invent itself.

If you're going to do that, though, charge money. You said it yourself elsewhere: if you aren't prepared to pay for it, you don't care.

I wonder in particular whether the best modern videoconferencing software would provide some of the motivating effect of meeting someone in person; I suspect the answer is "no" but it might be worth trying.

I am almost certain the answer is "at least a little bit".

More generally, I know that Aumann's Agreement Theorem means that it should be possible for a group of self-described rationalists to agree on what they should do next, but in practice I think that any choice of subgoal would reduce the number of rationalists who would want to be on board.

Conveniently (suspiciously so perhaps) the subgoal I am increasingly convinced would do the most good for effort involved is also one which it might be easiest to get rationalists to unite around: promoting rationalism itself. Think how different the world would be if people were to shut up and multiply a little more...

Really, I suspect that what's going on here has less to do with the motivating power of eternal damnation, and a lot more to do with the motivating power of physically meeting other people who share your cause.

Agreed. As I've discussed on OB, I spent an hour a week of my first 18 years in a Catholic church, and this rings very true. When I think back to the social exchanges between the clergy, I'm struck by how comfortable they [ahem, we] all strove to make one another. All the usual ins-and-outs and cliquey elements of any close-knit group were present - and not all of them pleasant - but I never saw any overt, public, disagreement or argument. It was taboo - simply didn't happen.

More corroboration - no-one ever talked about God outside the four walls of the church. Bingo, fundraisers, family, gossip, but pretty much no religion.

But long before we can begin to dream of any such boast, we secular humanists need to work on at least matching the per capita benevolent output of the worshippers.

www.amnesty.org.uk

Those people are out there Eliezer, as you no doubt know. There are secular humanists - incredible rationalists - who spend every waking moment backing up their rational altruism with energy and action. Sadly, I fear that they have more in common with the active, benevolent religious altruists of the world than with any forum-posting aspiring rationalists.

I wonder in particular whether the best modern videoconferencing software would provide some of the motivating effect of meeting someone in person; I suspect the answer is "no" but it might be worth trying.

How about trying to use Croquet (or some other 3D collaborative environment, with voice chat)?

I wonder in particular whether the best modern videoconferencing software would provide some of the motivating effect of meeting someone in person; I suspect the answer is "no" but it might be worth trying.

It probably would a little bit, but it would be such a hassle to set up that only a small fraction of people would do it.

A smaller but easier step in the same direction would be to use real names and real photos on this site.

As for solutions to akrasia, pjeby may have some, you have mentioned meditation, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and other posters mentioned yoga and (some) drugs. Something in there ought to give interesting results.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy and Zen meditation are two mental disciplines experimentally shown to yield real improvements.

Does anyone have a link or citation to actual research that supports this claim? It sounds plausible, I just want to check and see exactly how strong the evidence is before investing dozens of hours and/or a few thousand bucks.

Various themes in the culture of Catholicism make it easier to be charitable because they help Catholics avoid the rational arguments that would discourage them.

The most difficult hurdle to giving to a charity is determining if the charitable gift is worthwhile. Will the gift do enough good? Is the charity deserving? Are you just enabling poor people to stay poor? Catholicism by-passes all of these rational arguments with irrational beliefs*. These beliefs may not be universally held, but I believe they are part of the culture:

(1) Sacrifice is a good thing in of itself. Value is placed on the sacrifice itself, not just the good that comes out of the sacrifice. Thus the giving Catholic doesn't have to worry (as much) about whether the charity is really deserving.

(2) People in need have an elevated status. No need to argue within oneself about whether poor people deserve help and no need to weigh their utility function with your own -- as a Catholic, believe that they deserve the money or time more than you do.

(3) The reward is intangible. You don't need to expect or require that there will be an immediate benefit as a result of your charity. This prevents discouragement when the charity doesn't seem to be working.

Any person who gives to charity may hold any of these beliefs to any extent. I would bet that the more rational a person is, the more good they will do with a given amount of money. However, it is the irrational components that are probably most responsible for the amount of money that is given -- and the more money that is given the better, perhaps. Even though some money is wasted, there's more money going to the worthwhile charities as well.

*You could argue that the irrational beliefs are just assumptions that are made in the game. There may actually be rational arguments behind them, but the belief is a short-cut because the arguments need not be constantly re-examined, especially by the set people who are not interested in arguments.

You wrote "True, the Catholic Church also goes around opposing the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa. "

This might be the right rationalist position:

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/03/18/a-dead-debate/

"That aside, the good news for the Catholic Church’s supporters is that–even if, inevitably, the Pope’s counterintuitive suggestion enraged the liberal establishment–many editorialists now accept at least part of the Catholic position that the best solution to AIDS in Africa is fundamental behavior change, rather than condoms."

Passing out condoms increases the amount of sex but makes each sex act less dangerous. So theoretically it's indeterminant whether it increases or decreases the spread of AIDS.

Having just read this post for the first time has made me so happy!

Let me explain: Eliezer doesn't sound optimistic at all in this essay, especially compared to the gung-ho "we got this!" spirit of almost every other call to action post. And here I am, someone who's so new to LW I only just got to this post, and yet in the last year I have:

• Enjoyed rationalist parties with dozens of people.
• Went to over 20 weekly rationalist gatherings.
• Ran an EA charity research meetup.
• Got 3 other people hooked on the sequences.
• Am taking my girlfriend to Soltice next month.

With all that I don't even consider myself a central part of the community (either LW or EA) just someone hanging around the margins and trying to contribute occasionally.

Here's another thing to keep in mind with the Catholic Church: they've been around for 2,000 years, and they're one of 2,000 cults that made it. Can it be that there's nothing going on besides time and survivor bias? 6 years after this post was written, Givewell is affecting millions and MIRI just raised $600k by itself. I don't know if we should really still be looking up to the church for organization tips.

I don't have time to construct a full response, but I would like to hit a couple of points.

Catholics vs. rationalists: An analog seems to be large institutional investors (market makers) vs. small or independent investors. Clearly both kinds of market players (the very big vs. the small) play important roles, but the market makers, well, they have the ability to move the market in different directions because of the strength of their market position. "Following" the market makers is often viewed as a safe bet (i.e. a cheap risk computation) for a good return, but not always. Small investors seek out opportunities either missed by big investors, or misjudged by big investors.

Being an active member of the Catholic church requires forgoing critical thinking concerning a number of important aspects of reality, but such participants view this arrangement as being beneficial overall: it reduces the amount of mental computation that need be expended on a wide variety of subjects (no need to enumerate, I hope ;-) ). Some of the "benefits" gained by participants are that a number of "important causes" are prepared for them to act on, and many of them will. Although the Catholic church has it's full share of strange quirks, the thing we refer to as the Catholic church today is far more tame and humanistic than say it's 16-17th century version: many of the high-profile causes adopted by the church have pretty broad appeal as worthy issues. Of course, when Catholic missionaries go into an impoverished area to help feed and clothe people there is also an evangelical element. So, at least some of the causes picked up by the church will be "objectively" good, and some bizarre or bad (like condoms and family planning).

Rationalists, on the other hand are likely to explore many of these issues more in depth, as a result will also likely have a more diffuse impact on shaping future outcomes. Take world population (by humans) for example. Given the Catholic view of sexuality and reproduction, it is likely that the "cheap mental computation" that "participants" (and the people they effectively spread the "word" to) adhere to will likely have a negative impact on the human species' ability to survive. Rationalists are free to wander the landscape of ideas and turn their attention to many areas that the Catholic church (or any number of religious organizations) simply cannot find effective ways to engage, like the smaller investors above. In fact, it is precisely this rationalistic pressure on the Catholic church that has tamed it from the rather malevolent imperialistic beast it once was, to the more calculating and insidious beast it is today, only with a more friendly public-relations face.

On the other hand: better sanitation, and sources of clean water are probably the largest contributors to improving world health and longer lifetimes. Neither of these solutions to problems of human life came from religious organizations, and just possibly outrank the "output" of all religious organizations put together. The printing press and the "small" book did more for literacy and the development and spreading of ideas than any active effort by any European religion. The same could (should?0 be said for the Internet today. Could we come up with a better meaning for output?

So then we could say - with a certain irony, though that's not quite the spirit in which we should be doing things - that we should try to propagate a group norm of donating a minimum of 5% of income to real causes. (10% being the usual suggested minimum religious tithe.) And then there's the art of picking causes for which expected utilons are orders of magnitude cheaper (for so long as the inefficient market in utilons lasts).

I can see both the irony and benefit of promoting a group norm of tithing however that sort of social engineering is just not a tool that I specialise in. I'll leave the social motivating to the socially motivated.

Personally, I don't consider an emphasis on tithing to be an effective approach for me to go about increasing the expected utility of the universe upward. The reason goes back to the same quirks of human motivation. Earning money just isn't the funnest game for me to play. I know that if I pick an activity that pushes some element of humanity or civilisation in a desired direction and that is also something that sparks my interest then I'll be orders of magnitude more effective. And I don't say throw 'orders of magnitude' about as a flippant exageration. For me direct engagement on a practical goal vs creating wealth to tithe to the furtherment of a goal is the difference between overachievement and outright disfunction.

So basically you can taking your tithing and stick it. I'm going to keep my cash and continue working on developing specific kinds educational resources to give the kind of people I want to benefit the kind of benifit I want them to have.

But long before we can begin to dream of any such boast, we secular humanists need to work on at least matching the per capita benevolent output of the worshippers.

I find it somewhat interesting to note that there are plausible situations (involving tithing norms) that would make it beneficial to ostracize those who express the kind of individualist attitude and intent that I do above. That would be standard human behavior and it is the kind of thing that religions excel at. Religions have a stronger position from which to enforce conformity while humanism has a greater proportion of people who, like me, would contemptuosly reject overt attempts at norm enforcement. That, unfortunately, is an advantage that the Dark is likely to hold for the forseeable future.

Businesses have team building events which, for all the mockery they generate, seem to work.

Is there a case to organise rationalist paintball or games nights? Maybe during conferences or major gatherings.

1)"purposes of of motivation" is a typo, I presume.

2)Don't use abbreviation CBT. It brings BDSM readings, and it is not even THAT unreasonable to read the idea that males will be more motivated if threatened (or offered pleasure, for certain types) with CBT. ;)

The Catholic Church isn't quite as bright and shiny as it used to be. If it's losing ground in Ireland, this is remarkable.

Your link doesn't prove anything about what Catholic theologians believe.

I'm not sure that Catholics actually tithe, even though they're supposed to. Does anyone have information?

More generally, trying to build irrational loyalty may have non-obvious costs.

As for rational loyalty, a while ago, I went to a workshop hosted by Unitarians about the people's long term relationship with their religion. The thing that struck me was the amount of mutual aid within religions. This is something which can build stable social structures, though I grant that there's got to be felt unity to get the mutual aid started, and you may be right that meeting is essential to make that happen.

Interesting article, and one of the few I've seen that has bothered with this idea. One of the big problems (as noted elsewhere) is that there is precious little that holds secular humanists together in a coherent, close knit society like religion does. In fact, that's probably why the vast majority of the planet's population professes faith in God/holy book/enlightened savior. I have never considered it likely that the average Catholic, for instance, really believes in the doctrone of transubstantiation. What is so obviously not a miracle (bread remains bread, wine remains wine) is transformed into such through the miracle of community. As a recent study points out, it's community and the sense of belonging that gives people who belong to a particular religious organization the higher sense of satisfaction than those of us who don't. Whether or not we as secular humanists can hope to achieve the output of the various religious organizations and charities will become increasingly important as the 21st century wears on. If we cannot come together as a community in more meaningful ways, and see each other as those who belong to faith communities do, the question of output will become entirely moot. Then it will become a question of whether or not such a movement can even exist and compete.

Your article is based on the premise that it is important for us to help complete strangers who don't mean anything to us. That sacrifice is a constant of righteousness regardless of a person's beliefs or lack thereof.

From an objective viewpoint, sacrifice is wrong. Why should we have to give value in return for lesser value, or no value at all? We should help people because they have value to us, not because they are unable to be valuable at all.

"The man with guilt is the man who will do whatever you tell him to." The reason religious people do this is because they are taught from a young age that it is moral to sacrifice and amoral to trade with the acquisition of a value in mind. Their guilt does the rest.

Maybe the reason most rationalists don't devote as much self-sacrifice to the world around them is because they hold somewhat of an objective viewpoint, and a moral code that has no room for self-sacrifice. In short, most rationalists don't feel guilty for not helping people they don't know. Why should they feel guilty for that?

Really, I suspect that what's going on here has less to do with the motivating power of eternal damnation, and a lot more to do with the motivating power of physically meeting other people who share your cause.

Agreed. As I've discussed on OB, I spent an hour a week of my first 18 years in a Catholic church, and this rings very true. When I think back to the social exchanges between the clergy, I'm struck by how comfortable they [ahem, we] all strove to make one another. All the usual ins-and-outs and cliquey elements of any close-knit group were present - and not all of them pleasant - but I never saw any overt, public, disagreement or argument. It was taboo - simply didn't happen.

More corroboration - no-one ever talked about God outside the four walls of the church. Bingo, fundraisers, family, gossip, but pretty much no religion.

But long before we can begin to dream of any such boast, we secular humanists need to work on at least matching the per capita benevolent output of the worshippers.

www.amnesty.org.uk

Those people are out there Eliezer, as you no doubt know. There are secular humanists - incredible rationalists - who spend every waking moment backing up their rational altruism with energy and action. Sadly, I fear that they have more in common with the active, benevolent religious altruists of the world than with any forum-posting aspiring rationalists.

I don't agree with anything about your post, from assumptions to conclusions.

I'd say it's highly irrational money to give to any charitable cause. As far as I can tell most charities have laudable goals and don't even keep track record of meeting them. The best they can tell is that they actually spent some high percent of their money taken on some efforts vaguely related to the goal, not on the most cost effective means of meeting their goals. That's assuming we know what goals to donate to, what's not really true.

Well, I know for sure that an extremely effective way of helping poor people of the world (one of the most popular targets one way or another) is selfishly trading with them. That's what I do, I buy cheap sweatshop-produced stuff. And it probably helps them more than I would by sending them money.

If there was suddenly an extra pound in the world and I had to decide best use for it - I would use it on myself. Seriously. And so by marginal reasoning I don't donate a single pound to any charity. I don't need it to feel good, and that's really what charities are about. Not about any causes.

Also - I don't know any Catholic who gives 10% of their income to charities, including the Catholic Church. Where did you come up with absurdly exaggerated figure like that?

The catholics like most other religious/political/humanitarian organizations tend to agree among themselves about the causes they care about. Can you make rationalists to agree on what projects are most deserving of their money and effort (aside from preaching their own views)?

I've been part of an attempt at a virtual meetup using skype, it did seem a fair bit more involving than text chat so it might indeed be a workable path. We certainly had great fun and will do it again.

"then we run out of mental energy"

No. This is bullshit. There is no(t sufficient) good evidence of ego depletion.

Nonsense is generally easier to generate than sense.

Humanism, while fairly nonsensical itself, makes more sense than most world religions. Thus, any measurable 'output' of Humanism is likely to be less than that of any other religion you might choose.