Moreno,
The issue at hand that makes a difference is that of questioning, not just the example cases, but the general status of offering people a religious solution that ends up causing harm.
The reason that it is in question is because the standard up until now has been to leave it on the shoulders of those adhering, and to have no specific laws for religious institutions regarding their claims and whether or not they can fulfill those claims.
Let’s just toss the two examples out for the moment and address the general concept.
Religious institutions generally are left alone when their prescriptions and claims do not work out for an adherent. This permits the environment whereby the religious institutions are free to make any claim, regardless of the outcome, and the fallout is generally left upon the feet of the adherent.
In commercial marketing, there is generally a set of laws regulating the ability to make claims that are incapable of being rendered in guarantee.
Because religion is seen as a willful act of the individual to adhere to culturally, it is generally not seen as the same as a marketed product.
However, there is no real difference between the two when harm comes into the result.
It doesn’t really matter whether banks or politicians are or are not held accountable in like fashion in a given country, as to whether or not religious institutions should or should not be held to some fashion of responsibility for the claims in which they prescribe to an adherent.
Whether we think the individuals are idiots or not, they are trusting the provider to prescribe a successful remedy for their existential ailment in some fashion, and the provider is not required to adhere to a form of ethos regarding the general safety and care of the adherent due to the results of their prescriptions.
In fact, if the adherents are gullible suckers or idiots, then that is more of a reason to hold the one making the claims and prescriptions accountable; unless they too can prove that they are equally as ignorant of the consequences as the adherents - in which case they should be held accountable for offering prescriptions and practices without full knowledge of their trade.
I can easily start up a spiritual center and offer remedies for depression and link it to evil energy, and then prescribe people to change their diets and choices in their quality of living in the assertion that it pleases the divine right of good energy.
This may all seem benign, but I can also then later declare that I received a revelation from the divine energies that homosexuals were the absolute worst energy that will suck your soul dry and cause you all the ill in your life.
I can prescribe that every adherent do everything in their will to remove homosexual individuals from their lives so to attain right energy.
Now a bunch of adherents, after getting everyone emotionally invested at great length before the anti-homosexual decree, are going to cut off friends and family members from being part of their life.
I, the prescriber, have destroyed social unities by a claim.
The claim also asserts that in destroying social unity, the individuals will find good energy and be rid of their depressions.
Now, if even a single adherent increases in depression because they have an actual physiological variation of clinical depression and the adherence to the order to rid homosexuals from their lives removed them from proximity with their only remaining parent and caused them much suffering as a result, all the while believing that they will be alleviated from their suffering as a result of following this very difficult path that I repeatedly assure them is gainful spiritually for them, then it should stand to be of good measure that I should be held accountable for the harm caused by my reckless prescription which did not alleviate their existential suffering, but instead increased it many fold; not to mention damaged a portion of social stability in the community.
I don’t see any fault in holding such laws, and I’ve always thought that it was odd that such laws were absent, considering the ramifications of unchecked cultural prescriptions on merely the grounds of unverifiable metaphysical authority for the alleviation of existential suffering.