Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. 0.50 Agree Disagree

Argument TreesHow arguments are scored →

Weight for 0.00 · weight against 0.00 · net +0.00

Each reason is a claim with its own page. Score = sign x (2 x Truth - 1) x Conf x Link x Imp x Uniq, and every column is here so the row can be multiplied out and checked. A reason argued false scores negative and counts against the side it is filed on; a reason nobody has argued yet scores exactly 0, and so does one whose own page has no work behind it.

What Would Change the AnswerTruth scores →

Every claim beneath this page held at false and then at true, one at a time, with the whole graph recomputed each time. "If false" and "if true" are where this page’s truth score lands; "Move" is how far apart they are. "If settled" is that same distance with the input’s confidence held at 1, which is what it would be worth once the work behind it is finished, so the gap between Move and If settled is the value of doing that work. This is one input at a time and finds single points of failure; it does not test several inputs moving together, which is how correlated assumptions actually fail.

Related Beliefs

1. Communities are generally better off when most people belong to a religious congregation. 0.50
2. Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. (this page)

The other beliefs filed under Religion; this one is listed unlinked.

Not filled in yet

Parts of the template nobody has filled in here. They are named rather than shown, because an empty table is not a finding, and each one is a reason the confidence above is not higher. A part that takes rows has a form for its first one.

What this page needs right now

Named gaps, read off the tables above, so a newcomer can see exactly where a contribution goes. None of them requires agreeing with the page, and each one links to the form it goes in.

What the numbers are made of

Share on the agree side

no scored weight either way

Confidence

32%. Weakest parts: scrutiny 0% · grounding 0%

Depended on

ReasonRank 0.0033, 81 of 2173

Strongest reason for

Laws are enforced with fines and jail on people of every faith and of none, so it is unfair to punish someone for breaking a law whose only justification is a creed they do not share. +0.00

Strongest reason against

Many people's deepest moral convictions come from their faith, and asking them to leave those convictions out when they vote on laws or argue for them is asking them to take part in lawmaking as someone other than themselves. -0.00

What would move this most

Settling Laws are enforced with fines and jail on people of every faith and of…: 0.50 if false, 0.50 if true

Coverage

Of 6 scored rows, 6 have no linkage page, 6 have no importance page, 6 have no uniqueness page. This page reads 6 other pages. 6 of them are one-sided or empty: Laws are enforced with fines and jail on people of every faith and of none, so it is unfair to punish someone for breaking a law whose only justification is a creed they do not share.; When the state backs one faith's rules, every other faith loses freedom, and the majority faith loses it too the moment it stops being the majority.; Religious arguments rest on revelation that evidence cannot check, so bringing them into lawmaking ends the debate instead of continuing it.; Many people's deepest moral convictions come from their faith, and asking them to leave those convictions out when they vote on laws or argue for them is asking them to take part in lawmaking as someone other than themselves.; Secular moral views about what the law should be also rest on assumptions no one can prove, so barring only religious reasons from lawmaking is not neutral but favors one worldview over another.; Many of the reform movements people now admire argued for changes in the law from faith, so a rule keeping religious reasons out of lawmaking would have shut out some of the most important legal reforms..

Bottom line

The disagreement turns on whether laws need reasons that anyone can examine and check, or whether every moral view, religious or secular, rests on a starting point that cannot be proved.

Structural Checks

Faults the shape of the argument can show without reading a word of it: a claim used to support itself, a conclusion listed among its own premises, the same page counted twice. None of these changes a score. The wiki also specifies pattern-matching the prose for ten named fallacies; that is deliberately not done here, because a matcher looking for “attacking the person rather than the argument” would fire on the central legitimate argument on this whole site, and a score moved by a regular expression has no page to appeal to.

Scoring EngineTruth scores →

Cite this page Religious beliefs should almost never be the basis for deciding what the law should be. Idea Stock Exchange, belief page religious-beliefs-almost-never, truth 0.50, confidence 32%, revision 42c8344 of 2026-10-04. The revision is what makes this quotable: these numbers move as the argument is worked on, and rebuilding that revision reproduces them exactly.

Every number on this page as data: religious-beliefs-almost-never.json. Constants: K = 1 · UNARG = 0.5 · DEFLINK = 1 · DEFIMP = 0.5 · DEFUNIQ = 1. A reason placed under a conclusion is presumed relevant until a linkage page says otherwise; the burden is on the challenger. The neutral start for importance, the wiki's own rule.

Every value here is computed from the tables above at build time. Nothing is typed.