My opinion on altruism has changed recently. Where once I would consider my current views jaded and cynical, I know consider them reasonable. I think that there is no such thing as true altruism. That is, every time you give something of yourself to someone else without expecting a favour in return, the benefit you get still exceeds the help you're giving. The benefit may be just knowing that you've helped someone. That's a nice feeling, and donating money is essentially 'paying' someone in a bad situation to make you feel better for helping them get out of that situation, or at least cushioning their fall somewhat.

I thought about this on the way home today. I think everyone essentially wants to feel that altruistic inner goodness from time to time, and does nice things without getting, expecting or even wanting anything tangible in return. We donate money, we volunteer, we listen. Sometimes we receive it, but when we give it, we generally don't expect anything back. Everyone gets a kick from that unless they're a right ****. But there's some maximum level above which you're not prepared to give of yourself. I imagine that none of us here would be willing to donate every worldly possession you have for the poor, even though most of us have probably done something to help a poor person at some point. There's some altruistic trade-off---an efficient supply of altruism from each person that is enough to give us a nice kick but beyond which the cost to ourselves is greater than the inherent benefit of giving. So we stop giving at this efficient level. That's fine, I think we all do this.

However if you were religious, and you believed that when you help someone in a crap place, you're essentially getting spiritual reward in addition to that 'nice guy kick', would you be willing to give more? The eventual benefit you get from being altruistic is, according to your beliefs, greater than if you did not have those beliefs. So you give more.

I couldn't really work out if this made sense in the ten minutes I spent thinking about it. So what do you think? Do you agree with me about the nature of altruism? And should we expect that theists are more altruistic than atheists? Is there evidence one way or another?