Tax

So, my tax problems from 2000/2001 are not sorted out yet and its time to file again. That seems to be going ok so far, although no doubt it still has plenty of time to go pear shaped.
The blood-out-of-a-stone effort required to get information out of the IRD issue aside, I don't really have a problem with paying my taxes. That may be because I have always been too poor to feel like I was giving much more than I was getting, but I like to think that it is because I have a social conscience.
Anyway while doing my return I was confronted with the question of whether I should claim a rebate on my charitable donations.
I'd have to go to some effort and get hold of a receipt that I don't have, which seems like a bother. But it is more the question of whether it is actually the right thing to do.
On the one hand, it is a perfectly legitimate rebate and since I did not donate anything with a view to receiving it, to do so would not be wrong. Yet it doesn't feel right.
I make a monthly contribution to Unicef, it only about 1% of my base salary, but it is as much as I can afford. I deliberately chose an overseas aid organisation because, although there are social problems in NZ they are insignificant in comparision with those in other parts of the world and I believe that through my taxes I make a contribution to addressing them. So I don't think that I am entitled to tax relief because of my private charitable contributions. Besides to take back some of the money that you gave even indirectly seems to negate or at least greatly diminish the original act of giving. I suppose it comes down the purpose and meaning of charity.
My thinking on the issue isn't terribly clear on the matter. But I know what it is not.
Charity is not about giving what you don't want or have no use for, that is recycling. And it is not about giving to get back, except possibly in a karmic sense. And tax rebates aren't karma. One has to deliberately apply. Form the intention to profit from your own charitable actions and thereby destroy their worth.
Actually the more I think about it the more confused my postition becomes.
It bothers me. The one thing that I would really like is to have is a consistent and coherent philosophy that I could live by and most of all articulate. But my mind is a mess. It feels a database that just needs to be sorted properly only I don't know how. Sure you can get certain information out of it, even make the odd connection but it really just does not work very well. I keep putting more info in, but not in any kind of systematic way and I am probably too undisciplined to ever tidy it up.
Still at least I have decided not to make a claim.