How Can There Be Any Sin in Sincere?: State Inquiries into Sincerity of Religious Belief
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Syndicat Northcrest v. Amselem, the Supreme Court of Canada held that while the government may inquire into the sincerity of a Charter claimant’s religious belief, such inquiries must be as limited as possible and may not rely on the only two objective criteria that may practicably be available to the state to test sincerity: consistent practice and expert opinions. This article expresses the view that the restrictions imposed by the Court in Amselem on the state’s inquiry into sincerity make it virtually impossible for the province to reliably weed out persons with “fictitious” or “capricious” claims, and this restriction may actually make it more difficult for the state to tolerate religious exemptions from laws of general application. The state’s ability to reliably test for religious sincerity became a central concern in Alberta’s decision to terminate the religious exemption for photo-I.D. driver’s licences, a policy which was upheld by the Supreme Court in the Hutterian Brethren case. The jurisprudence should permit the government to require evidence of a “shared and corroborated religious belief” in order to offer exemptions for members of religious communities while ensuring that the government’s objective can still be effectively achieved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".