Politics, beliefs and motivations questions should not be allowed here.

Question

These questions should be made off-topic because they are not answerable based on available evidence. In other words, there is nothing scientific in the investigation of the evidence.

Also, they may be mainly rhetorical questions. They may not be motivated by real curiosity, but by wanting to make a statement of sorts—often implicitly in the question.

This site should not concern itself with any of the following:

• Religious, philosophical, theological disputes: a metaphysical position is not addressable via scientific skepticism.
• Political arguments which are based on ideology and not on fact.
• Dietrology (the idea that people can presume motives based on actions—source)

Therefore the following types of questions will not be welcome here:

• Questions about someone's faith or beliefs or metaphysical positions: e.g., "Was X [Christian/Jewish/Hindu/Pastafarian/atheist]?"

• Questions about personal and political motivations and other intangibles: e.g., "Did X do Y because of Z?", "Did politician A endorse policy B because he had agenda C?"

• Questions which are not strictly scientific evidence based: e.g., "Was X the only one believing that Y?", "Does [your chosen deity] exist?", "Will X thing happen in the future?"

To incorporate some feedback:

Questions may have a political or religious undertone, but they should not be about politics or religion. There are some good questions related to politics or religion (some questions about news reporting of political figures, some question regarding religious texts or artefacts).

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Example questions to burninate:

• Was Hitler a Christian?
  We don't know what he believed. We can guess from his writing or from his actions, and imply motivation from there, but there is no way of scientifically investigating belief.
• Was there a pact between the Mafia and the Italian government in the 1990's?
  Impossible to prove. There is wildly diverging evidence, and the whole question is heavily politically loaded in Italy, making most evidence basically unconvincing.
• Did Gore support climate change because of personal gain?
  We don't know why Gore did anything. Did he gain something? For sure, e.g. a Nobel prize, but asking whether he did support climate change because of the personal gain cannot be answered through proof.
• Was Bush the only one believing that Iraq had WMD?
  We don't know what people believe - especially politicians, who have all interest in saying what makes them popular, instead of publicly stating their true beliefs.

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Related questions:

• Is the scope of this site unlimited?

• How do you skeptically investigate Hitler's religion?

• Is there really a reason why so many questions really need to include the word 'really'?

• Posting etiquette

Answer 1

More a request for clarification than an answer, but...

Religious disputes
Political disputes

I think there's value to be had in questions motivated by both of these - but the question itself should hold strict to claims that can be objectively proved / disproved:

Does Al Gore profit from the sale of carbon offsets?

Either there are publicly-available disclosures to back this up, or there aren't. Speculation can be safely removed.

Does Al Gore profit from his AGW activism?

Without a specific claim, this starts to get sketchy, as it opens the scope up to philosophical disagreements. Both questions are clearly politically-motivated, but that's fine - so long as the role of this site is limited to providing solid information and not constructing arguments for, or hosting the debates themselves.

...Which, incidentally, seems to be a bit of a problem. DVK pointed out this question last night, which raises a specific claim and is by and large a decent question... The top-voted, accepted answer spends its last paragraph trying to argue against the political motivations of the original claim. It's understandable, but adds a strong subjective element to the answer. Strict NPOV may be too much to hope for, but if the answers to these questions are going to devolve into dietrology then any effort put into keeping it out of the questions themselves is for naught.

Answer 2

In order to prevent skepticism (only believing that for which there is evidence) from degenerating into nihilism (not believing anything), one needs to admit that one has to deal in degrees of certainty. (I will elaborate on this if it is a contentious claim.)

However, we must then admit that we can know what people are thinking with some degree of certainty. Maybe it's not a very high degree of certainty, but I think, for instance, we would be safe assuming that Martin Luther King Jr. thought that segregation and discriminatory practices of the 1950s in the U.S. were unfair and unjust for African Americans, given that he said as much on numerous occasions and devoted his life to changing those practices.

In particular, questions about the public or historical record can answer, for some individuals anyway, to a reasonable degree of confidence, the question of whether X was a Y. For example, if one hears that "Cary Grant was a L.A. Dodgers fan", one could certainly look for supporting evidence; if one found that old newspaper accounts put him at Dodgers games, that he had season tickets, that he often talked about the Dodgers, etc., then I think the sensible conclusion is that most likely, yes, he was a Dodgers fan.

Likewise, substituting a religious or political figure in for some other individual does not change whether and how a question can be answered, but may cause a question to take on the air of a religious dispute. For example, "Can Oprah Winfrey cure leprosy with a touch", "Could Mother Teresa cure leprosy with a touch", and "Can Mike Huckabee cure leprosy with a touch" are all questions that a skeptic should feel comfortable addressing by looking for supporting or contradictory evidence.

Now, one could make a policy that religious questions are forbidden for entirely different reasons than whether or not they can be answered, namely that people feel strongly about the answers and thus asking such questions may contribute to hostility and other negative consequences, and that the benefit from increasing our confidence in the answers to these questions is outweighed by the social problems caused.

But the premise that these questions "are not answerable based on available evidence" is false. Some such questions are answerable to a reasonable degree.

And if the answers must be "scientific" in any deep sense, then not just (most of) religion and politics, but almost anything relating to the humanities, a very large fraction of the social sciences, a good deal of medicine, etc., should be off topic. For example, if a rumor is going around that "Microsoft sued Anderson Windows to change their name to Anderson Glass and Portals", one could debunk this by examining public information, but without doing anything particularly "scientific".

Answer 3

Also, they may be mainly rhetorical questions. They may not be motivated by real curiosity, but by wanting to make a statement of sorts—often implicitly in the question.

Isn't that a mainly rhetorical argument. I don't think we have a rule that says you have to be genuinely curios about something to ask a question, otherwise we would have to go and delete a bunch of questions. Not only that but you'd need insight into what people believe to judge that. I'm pretty sure there has been plenty of people that have been curious what Einstein believe reading something where he invoked God.

We don't know what people believe

Maybe, but peoples beliefs aren't an unknowable black box or cognitive science, sociology and psychology wouldn't exist. We can't know something 100%, but science doesn't require that, so why should we? We can certainly gather the evidence for, and against and conclude whatever seems more likely and make a comment about that, adding that the answer is sometimes simply we don't know.

Was Hitler a Christian

Is in principle no more unanswerable than:

Is Richard Dawkins an atheist?

In some cases we have evidence in letters where historical figures explicitly deny belief in God (like in Einsteins case). If someone admits to openly to being of one religion, in private correspondence, goes to church every day and so on. We can with a fair degree of certainty say: "Yes, the Pope is indeed a Christian."

I think it's completely irrelevant to his action if Hitler was a Christian or not, and the question "Did Hitler commit war crimes because he was Christian?" is not the same as "Was Hitler Christian?", but both of those questions are answerable. In Hitlers case there should even be plenty of scholarly articles on the subject.

Was there a pact between the Mafia and the Italian government in the 1990's?

What if the question was:

Was there a conspiracy involving high level officials to re-elect the president of the United States in 1970?

A: Watergate

Has there ever been a Corporate conspiracy to perform a military coup-de tat in the 20th century?

A: Business Plot

Has the British and Americans ever plotted to overthrow a democratically elected government?

A: Operation Ajax

Did Gore support climate change because of personal gain?

This is what you could do:

• Go over all the Interviews with Gore talking about his motivations.
• Show if he do earn money from climate change.
• Compare his earnings to positions that he could like be in based on his merits other than climate change issues.
• Compare his earnings to other people in similar positions.

If there's no evidence that suggest he's talking about climate change primarily for monetary-gain then the answer should be no or we don't know. Plenty of people have expressed their primary motivators, and unless we have good reason to think they are lying or are wrong, I don't see why we should give a different answer.

Was Bush the only one believing that Iraq had WMD?

I don't understand how that's hard to answer, you would only need to show a single person that seem to have a deep conviction that Iraq had WMDs? Refer to interviews with people who was in the loop, collaborate their stories.

This sites purpose isn't original research, it's largely to gather the evidence from other sources. As such I don't see how it would be a huge issue to answer these questions as we can't do it by reasoning alone.

Answer 4

All the hypnosis question on the website fall more or less under dietrology. They are about the intentions of participants. Should we declare those questions off topic?

Answer 5

If, under this policy, the question "Is Barack Obama a Muslim?" is off-scope, then the policy is wrong.

Edit: Even if we can't be 100% sure about what someone believes, doesn't mean we can't debunk spurious evidence that he is a Muslim. Leaving such nonsense unchallenged would be waving the white flag of surrender.

Answer 6

I agree that questions about whether motivations exist or not are unprovable and therefore off-topic.

However, I would caution to differentiate between questions that ask about someone's motivation, and question that ask about straightforward provable/predictable facts that could be used by someone as motivation if they are true (as long as the question explicitly clarifies that "speculating about whether this fact was in fact the motivation is off topic for this question").

An example of difference:

• Does passing a law mandating all houses be painted pink have material impact on projected revenue of a company producing pink paint?

  vs.

• Did Senator X push for the law that all houses have to painted pink because his nephew owns stock in a company producing pink paint?

The latter is impossible to prove (unless there's a document/hidden recording where the person expressed their motivation). The former is very easy to prove or disprove based on standard finance.

To use a non-imagined question:

• Do people sell bonds because they want to punish government for inflationary policies? (motivation impossible to prove).

  vs.

• Do people sell bonds when they make an assumption that government policies are inflationary? (On-topic. Basic finance. If someone is convinced that inflation is coming, you make money by going short treasury. Reference - any finance textbook). As long as the question clearly states that whether the belief of the seller is justified or not is not up for discussion (to avoid the question devolve into "this policy will cause inflation" vs "No will not" discussion).

Answer 7

Maybe Politics, Religion and Motivation questions should not be allowed and Maybe not.

I believe the more important part is that it must be allowed in the ANSWER when it is necessary to explain the who's, how's, and why's.

Al Gore above is a great example. I am not taking political sides, as most would describe me as a left leaning environmentalist

• It was a fact that Al Gore's investments were in-line with what he was selling (and I'm a believer in global warming).

• Argument: smart to invest in what you believe: But why then did he sit on his hands while he was a VP?

• Before he was elected he punched his meal ticket by passing as one of the most ardent environmentalists in main stream politics at the time.

• Thus IMHO it can not be ignored that he was aligned to make lots of money and was a contributing factor

I do not believe one should eliminate Motivation from an answer when it could very obviously play a large role in the question "why". If a certain person, faction or group had a large monetary gain in the outcome - an many times this happens to involve politics (as it regulates or deregulates) and religion (as it plays on the emotions of the masses and is largely recognized as a tool to persuade, control or at least have a large percentage of people side with a particular view or action).

Unfortunately this does happen and if one were to look at my answers you can see where it was done. When there is a pattern and history of a certain behavior how can this be dismissed? Apparently it's ok to identify an immoral pattern of behavior carried out by a corporation and thus it can not be used in context of explaining skepticism. If you were to put person in place of corporation it would be seen completely differently. Example: It would be like setting free a man that has a history of violent & aggressive acts towards women. After found that the man was guilty of another instance of a violent act of aggression towards a woman he once again walks. Then when you show skepticism of this man's next moves it is completely out of line?

Answer 8

I think political motivation is on topic.

For example, Russia attack Finland under justification of being attacked first. Did Russia fire missiles from Finland to Russia to justify attacking Finland? Of course.

Political motives are actually pretty obvious when we are objective and disinterested. That means as long as it doesn't involve current politics or religions, the motives are pretty obvious.

However, when current politics and religions gets involved, the motives gets pretty sketchy. Even the status quo is the one that requires suspension of disbelief more.

What humans typically want, money, mates, preventing others from being happy, is within the realm of scientific.