Tithe

When I was a kid, my parents taught me to give 10% of the money I earned to the church. I tithed from my allowance and birthday card money under their and god’s watchful eyes when the offering plate passed by me every Sunday. The Nazarene Church and Amway multi-level marketing scheme my parents believed in seemed to agree on the prosperity theology. “If god cannot trust you with a little bit of money, he won’t be able to trust you with more.” My mother must have done budgeting gymnastics to stretch their lower-middle class income to account for god’s needs when they had 4 children.

We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.

[…]

…the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.

I appreciate my parents teaching me the responsibility individuals have to fund the future they want to see. While we differed in our motivations and visions for the future, I still donate 1–10% of my income.

Here are some organizations and initiatives I support financially because I believe they are building heaven on earth.

2024

• Digital human rights advocacy
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is responsible for some of the most important digital privacy, free speech, and innovation preservation legal victories in the US.
  • NOYB is the legal nonprofit forcing EU countries to actually enforce EU privacy laws.
  • European Digital Rights (EDRi) promotes digital rights in Europe.
  • Fight for the Future has organized some of the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible.
  • Föreningen för Digitala Fri- och Rättigheter (DFRI) promotes digital rights in Sverige.
• Open source software projects
  • Signal Foundation is the nonprofit responsible for the end-to-end encrypted messaging app.
  • Mastodon gGmbH. is the organization responsible for the open source Twitter-like social web app.
  • Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) is the nonprofit organization operating the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority making HTTPS available to every website for free.
  • Servo is a next-gen browser engine written in Rust with significant contributions merged into Firefox. It started as a research and development project at Mozilla, but its developers were part of the Mozilla layoff. Its work continues under the Linux Foundation.
  • Open Web Docs is the non-profit that took over primary MDN contribution after the Mozilla layoff.
  • Bird.makeup is a Twitter—social web bridge.
• Other causes
  • Kiva provides microloans to the 1.7 billion people who do not have access to financial services they need to get out of poverty.
  • World Food Programme (WFP) provides food assistance to hungry people in over 120 countries.
  • Bedford Public Library System, the library of my childhood, receives LGBTQ+ book donations from me.
  • AIDS/LifeCycle supports the SF AIDS Foundation’s health programs for reducing new HIV infections and improving the quality of life for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Post image created using DALL•E with prompt “A church offering plate made of brass”.