[Indrid Cold]

That's an interesting approach, but I think it's not a proper comparison. Consider other religous groups, say, the Amish or Pentecostals. I imagine their statistics would be similarly skewed if compared to a state which is made up of people of many different faiths. Further, your study only covers itemized charitable deductions, which would mean that the donor would have to have an income big enough to worry about taking the writeoff.

Pagans do a lot of volunteer work, including prison outreach, picking up litter, and whatnot, but they're not shown as being big money donors to pagan organizations because a) they don't have any, and b) there aren't that many pagan orgs that are on a size or money level to bother with filing taxes.

I dunno. I'd almost want to say they're similar to non-casino-owning reservation Indians--plenty of people helping people, not a whole lot of paperwork.

[drhogan]

there may e more to this than is apparent. when christianity first started out, before big charities existed, there was a real ethic of the christian community helping others--but i think the people being helped were largely poor christians, as opposed to e.g., poor pagans or romans or jews. this ethic still exists, indpendently of the big charitable organizations.
i don't know whether there is a communcal ethic of pagans helping the pagan poor. the pagan stuff that i have read doesn't focus on it--they seem very focused on the environment. so the real question is not about how much money is being donated to the poor, but how strongly an ethic of helping the poor is being emphasized by pagans. but pagans will have to answer this question; i don't know the answer.