Archive for January, 2010

I originally wrote this essay in May, 2005. At the time, I called myself pagan. Since then, I’ve come to call myself an atheist. I think some of the skepticism that eventually led me to atheism can be seen here.

I still think there’s a lot of value in the “tests” that I describe in this essay. In the “example” section, I apply the tests to claims made by a hypothetical pagan author, but they could apply to any claim that is being met with skepticism.

The neo-pagan values of tolerance and acceptance protect people who practice minority religions from the undeserved persecution and ridicule that those people often receive in mainstream society. At the same time, people sometimes abuse those values to avoid the persecution of their harmful, immoral, or unethical behaviors. These people disguise their behaviors as religious expression and co-opt its protections. Neo-pagans should consider under what circumstances behaviors that claim to be religious beliefs should be protected and under what circumstances they should be subject to scrutiny, skepticism, and criticism.

The values of religious tolerance and acceptance stem from the principle that everyone has the right to the religious beliefs and practices that he or she finds to be most satisfying and rewarding, and that a person’s religious beliefs and practices should be held absolutely immune from unwanted criticism and skepticism. I call this tenet religious inviolability.

Although I believe that religious inviolability is a fundamental personal right, it can also be justified rationally. Most people strive to avoid hypocrisy—behaving inconsistently with one’s pro­fessed beliefs. Based on an examination of various religions, I conclude that all religions have some beliefs that seem ridiculous, implausible, or irrational to non-believers. Therefore, a religious person would behave hypo­critically if he or she were to question anyone else’s religious beliefs on the basis of their credibility, plausibility, or rationality. Practice of religious inviolability is one way that a religious person can avoid hypocrisy.

Non-religious people must also practice religious inviolability in order to avoid hypocrisy. An irrational belief can be defined as one that a person holds in spite of a lack of supporting empirical evidence or in spite of empirical evidence that contradicts the belief. Religious beliefs usually fit that definition; therefore, I treat them simply as a subset of the more general category of irrational beliefs. Since even non-religious people often hold irrational beliefs, non-religious people would also behave hypocritically if they did not practice religious inviolability.

One might argue that we should grant religious beliefs special status relative to other irrational beliefs, but if so, then by what standard should we differentiate religious beliefs from other irrational beliefs? Religious beliefs seem personal and varied enough to preclude a universal standard of differentiation. One person’s myth may be another person’s religion. Inherent to religious inviolability is the premise that people have the freedom to specify which of their beliefs and practices they consider to be religious in nature. Therefore, we cannot treat irrational religious beliefs any differently than any other irrational beliefs.

In the previous paragraph, and throughout the rest of the document, I refer to “irrational religious beliefs.” Although I have observed that most religious beliefs are irrational, I do not mean to imply that all religious beliefs are inherently irrational. I am open to the possibility that some religious beliefs can be defined as rational, but I consider that topic to be outside the scope of this paper. Constantly using the “irrational” modifier eventually becomes tedious, so the reader should assume throughout the rest of the article that when I refer to “religious beliefs,” I am referring specifically to irrational religious beliefs. Since I believe that irrational beliefs make up the majority of religious beliefs, I feel that this shorthand is acceptable, but I would not want my shorthand to offend those who feel that they hold rational religious beliefs.

Tests and Principles

Given this background, I will now present tests and principles that I use to determine under what circumstances the principle of religious inviolability should protect behaviors and beliefs and under what circumstances scrutiny and skepticism should apply.

The Test of Scope

The test of scope states that, to the degree that a person’s decision affects only that person, religious inviolability should apply. As a person’s decision affects others, and especially when a person’s decision affects those who do not share the same religious beliefs as the person, the protection of religious inviolability decreases.

The essence of religious inviolability is that people have the right to make their own religious decisions, regardless of those decisions’ apparent irrationality. But each person’s religious freedom must carry equal weight. If a person makes a decision based on religious beliefs, and that decision will affect others who don’t hold those religious beliefs, that decision impinges upon the religious freedom of those others. If the affected people cannot come to an agreement that accommodates their religious beliefs, they must base their ultimate decision on some objective standard. Rational, verifiable beliefs are more objective than irrational, unverifiable ones, and should be that basis.

For example, a politician who passes laws that are based on religious beliefs should be subject to scrutiny and skepticism. Religious inviolability does not protect him or her because the effect of his or her religious-based decisions falls on those who do not share his or her religious beliefs. By an extension of the test of scope, a person who preaches religious beliefs in public gives up some of the protection of religious inviolability by nature of the fact that he or she is asking others to take on those religious beliefs and, hence, be affected by them. However, he or she retains some degree of protection, since each person is free to choose to share in religious beliefs or not. If he or she were coercing religious belief, as in a state religion, that would decrease the protection of religious inviolability further, since it would compromise a person’s right to choose his or her own religious beliefs.

The Test of Cost

The test of cost states that as the stakes of a decision increase, the necessity of using verifiable, rational beliefs also increases, even when the decision affects only the decision-maker, but especially when the decision affects others who do not share the same religious beliefs as the decision-maker. Irrational, unverifiable beliefs lead to inferior, less-‌consistently-‌good decisions compared to rational, verifiable, and testable beliefs. When the cost of a decision is low, the penalty for making a sub-optimal decision is also low. When the cost of a decision is high, it is more important to make an optimal decision.

I base the test of cost on an analysis in which I compare the cost of a behavior to the reward of its likely outcome. If the most likely outcome offers more reward than the cost, then the behavior is rationally justified. Religious freedom means that a person should be able to participate in irrational religious behaviors, even if those behaviors fail a strict cost-benefit analysis. But the greater the stakes of the choice, the more the cost of an irrational choice, until, at some point, the gravity of the penalty of the irrational choice challenges the sacredness of religious freedom.

For example, I participate in certain religious behaviors, such as regular prayer, and maintaining an altar space in my home. The cost of these behaviors is minimal: a few minutes of time per day, and a few dollars now and then for sacraments for the altars. I can’t justify this behavior rationally, but it feels good and it costs very little, so I continue the behavior even though it produces no concrete benefits (except, arguably, for feeling good). Take now the more extreme example of Christian Scientists, who eschew doctors in favor of faith healing. In the case of a critically ill person, an irrational decision about one’s healthcare can produce literally grave results. The test of cost explains why courts have ordered Christian Scientist parents to seek medical treatment for their children even though doing so violates the religious practices of Christian Scientists, but courts don’t order Orthodox Jewish parents to allow their children to wear secular clothing. Wearing out-of-the-ordinary clothing has minimal costs, in terms of social success and personal health, so religious inviolability reigns; not seeking medical treatment for a sick child has potentially dire costs, which makes it ethical to set aside religious inviolability. The test of cost also explains why doctors often reserve experimental or untested treatments for terminally ill patients for whom tested treatments have already failed. These patients have nothing to lose if the untested treatment fails, whereas a patient who was not terminally ill might worsen if untested treatments were substituted for ones that had been proven to work. The reader should keep in mind that in this case I have intentionally chosen extreme examples in order to illustrate the test of cost. One should not infer that I believe that only people with nothing to lose should receive religious freedom and protection!

The Principle of Full Disclosure

When a person makes a decision or enters into a transaction with another person, he or she has the right to do so based on an examination of all available evidence related to the decision or transaction. I refer to this as the principle of full disclosure. In many circumstances, society treats a person who intentionally withholds or misrepresents relevant information as unethical, especially if that person does so with the intent to benefit from the decision-maker’s ignorance in a way that the person would not if the decision-maker were more informed. Examples of the principle of full disclosure in action include laws that require pharmaceutical companies to disclose the side effects of drugs that they sell.

Along with the examination of evidence comes the need to evaluate the veracity of the evidence. Not all evidence is equal. Evidence that seems to come from reliable, trustworthy sources should usually be given greater weight than evidence that doesn’t, for example. Therefore, the principle of full disclosure also requires an ethical person to disclose not only the facts related to the decision or transaction, but also any supporting facts that might be necessary to allow the decision-maker to evaluate the veracity of the facts. Standards and certification bodies exemplify this aspect of the principle. For example, laws require licensed medical professionals to have finished a certain program of study. This requirement has the intent of assuring patients that they can grant a certain minimum level of trustworthiness to the information and advice given by a licensed medical professional

Irrational religious beliefs cannot be scientifically or independently verified (or else they would be rational). Religious people take their religious beliefs as a matter of faith, holding them regardless of their irrationality. Therefore, when it comes to decision-making, the decision-maker should be granted the opportunity to differentiate between irrational religious beliefs and experiences and beliefs that can be or have been independently or scientifically verified. It is unethical to misrepresent unverified or unverifiable religious beliefs as verified beliefs.

Example

I will now demonstrate how I apply all three of these principles to a specific situation.

Neo-pagan authors sometimes write books containing spells that purport to produce various effects. Whether these books should be protected as religious expression or not depends on how the author presents them. I have observed that the purveyors of magic spells nearly always reject offers to test those spells’ effects in a rational, scientific context. In that case, the principle of full disclosure demands that the author must clearly identify that he or she has not scientifically verified the spells’ effectiveness. Put simply, the author must clearly differentiate between scientifically tested facts and religious beliefs. I realize that not all of my readers grant the same value to scientific testing that I do; nevertheless, I submit that most readers would place scientifically tested information into some different category than untested or un-testable religious beliefs, and so would benefit from a clear distinction between the two.

In my experience, pagan authors seldom explicitly misrepresent the nature of the information that they present. Rather, they wrap the information in an air of mysticism and avoid the question of whether they tested it scientifically. This amounts to a lie of omission, although the reader must also take some responsibility for vetting the information of which he or she partakes. But readers of neo-pagan books of spells are often new to the topic and naïve, and so they bear less responsibility in this matter than the experienced authors that sometimes take advantage of them.

How does the test of cost apply to this situation? To answer that question, consider the nature of the spells’ claimed effects. Passing off an un-scientifically-tested spell to find a lover as scientifically tested will, at worst, have the effect of failing to find a lover for the magician. The magician has lost little except time, of which he or she ostensibly has plenty. In this circumstance, I would treat the spell as an innocuous religious expression and a matter of personal choice, protected by religious inviolability. If the spell requires expensive reagents, the cost of the irrational behavior increases, and the protection of religious inviolability decreases somewhat. Still, one certainly has the right to decide how one spends one’s own money! On the other hand, if the spell purported to cure a serious disease like cancer or diabetes or a condition like depression or other mood disorders, the protection of religious inviolability decreases dramatically, since a person who used the spell in lieu of a scientifically tested treatment risks serious consequences—death, at worst.

Conclusion

We should scrutinize and, sometimes, criticize people who misrepresent their religious beliefs as testable or tested facts. As the cost and scope of those claims increases, so does the ethical and practical necessity of scrutiny. However, a person can reclaim some of the protection of religious inviolability through application of the principle of full disclosure. If a person makes the religious nature of their claims absolutely clear, they shift some of the responsibility for the application of that information onto the people who use it. Unfortunately, many people lack the training in scientific methods necessary to be able to perform scientific tests and to analyze the validity of claims of scientific testing. Therefore, full disclosure may not fully protect a person’s expression of his or her beliefs, since he or she might incorrectly analyze the validity of the beliefs (for example, claiming and believing that the beliefs have been scientifically tested, when the methodology used has flaws that are obvious to a trained scientist) or since his or her audience might be duped by intentionally untruthful claims of scientific testing.