alt Hacker NewsStrong disagree.
One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.
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Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.
There's a fundamental disagreement among people on what "help" really is.
Giving money to someone who could otherwise work is very different from giving food to a single mother who is already working 10 hours a day. Giving needles to a drug addict "helps" them in a certain way, yes. But it also enables their addiction to continue.
Yea it's easy for everyone to say "I believe in helping people!!". But which side of the fence you sit on in the US is non-trivially determined by what you believe "help" looks like in practice.