Different people have different approaches to religious belief. One group of people will believe one set of things, another group will believe another, completely contradictory, set. Non-believers may see belief as irrational, or even downright dangerous. Richard Dawkins has talked about religious belief as a “virus of the mind”, or what he termed a “meme” in his writings. By seeing beliefs in black and white it may be that we are limiting our interpretation options. Rather, let us assume that belief in itself is not something necessary to remove, but rather the interpretation of that belief by non-believers.
In society religious belief posesses something of a skeleton key where many laws and social situations are concerned. We have a fear of intruding on peoples beliefs. In a discussion of something like circumcision, which many people feel is highly damaging, the fact that many people believe through their religions that circumcision is necessary means that others will see the discussion as a no-go area. This avoidance of the issue is where the real danger to society appears.
In some circumstances, treating religious belief as a no-go area has only minor implications. If we create a law to protect people from themselves, and some religions are allowed to be excluded does it matter? In these cases many people oppose such laws on nanny-state principles anyway. Let us take the example of motorcycle helmets. Laws exist in many countries stating that people must wear helmets while on motorcycles. Sikhs may then be allowed to avoid this requirement because they believe they must wear turbans. Who does this affect? Arguably nobody, we do not have to have any sympathy for a Sikh who is injured in a way that a helmet would have protected, it is their life decision just like we do not have to have sympathy for someone injured skydiving, or at least we can as people avoid feeling too bad about it and blame it on the individual. This argument becomes more complicated if health insurance and strain on national health systems are considered, but at that point everything becomes very complicated.
Occasionally this “its what they believe” approach does start to harm others. A debatable example might be Mormons and polygamy. Whether polygamy harms people or not might be open to debate. An example that certainly causes harm is where some religious groups believe that they are not allowed blood transfusions. In an individual case there are no obvious problems with this. The problem comes where peoples invidual beliefs have wider affects. Disallowing one’s children to have blood transfusions is a prime example of this problem. In this case the beliefs of parents are being applied to their children, with disasterous effects in some cases. Of course, these people believe they are doing their best for their children, protecting them for the afterlife, for example. Society would usually try to protect children from such activities, which could be considered to be amounting to negligence. Because these are religious beliefs, however, again society considers them sacrosanct and as a result children could die.
I think a very good example of this problem is in aspects of dress. Schools have been having problems with making exceptions to uniforms to placate religious groups. The only long term situation I can see here is that uniforms will be entirely unknown in state schools – maybe private schools too due to “discrimination” legislation, although whether or not religious schools will also have to fall in is open to question. Similarly we see many shopkeepers banning “Hoodies and motorcycle helmets” from their shops so that security cameras can see the faces of customers. Are those shopkeepers allowed to also ban people wearing religious headwear? It is unlikely that a turban could cause problems for cameras, but headscarves and other dress could easily. This wouldn’t be intentional discrimination against religions, afterall, rather the shopkeeper would not be conciously exclude religious wear from the rules.
We can all talk about “the thin end of the wedge”, an argument particularly popular from some of the lesser news publications (if you’ve ever read here before you may notice my views on some of those), but in this case an issue along those lines is evident. It may not be something that will get worse, as a thin end argument usually implies, but it is something with a continuous scale and no clear cutoff. If I believed that 6 year old girls should have to have intercourse with middle aged men as a rite of passage, would that be ok to exclude on religious grounds? Or if I felt that ritually cutting deep scars into the cheeks of my children was appropriate?
It is my view that very deep consideration should be taken in the direction of removing religious allowances completely from laws. When a religious disagreement with a law arises it should be considered whether or not that point is one of general application and that the law should be changed generally as a result. It is obvious that excluding minorities is not appropriate, and this is one reason why many believe representative democracies are better than direct versions, but excluding the majority is not appropriate either.