The Adherence Spectrum:
Introduction

A person may be an adopter of a particular belief system, yet not subscribe to all of its doctrines. To what extent a person subscribes to an established belief system, or in other words adheres to it, can be quantified using a gauge called the adherence spectrum. The adherence spectrum measures a person's extent of adherence to a belief system by evaluating to what degree they subscribe to the belief system's most important doctrines.

As previously mentioned, in addition to Foundational Doctrines and Secondary Doctrines, a belief system may also have Miscellaneous Doctrines. Miscellaneous Doctrines are defined as the doctrines that are established by the belief system's authority that are outside of the belief system's Foundational and Secondary doctrines. The adherence spectrum does not incorporate Miscellaneous Doctrines into its gauging, but instead incorporates only the Foundational Doctrines and Secondary Doctrines. This is because the Foundational and Secondary doctrines are the most important doctrines of a belief system, central to maintaining the belief system's unification and consistency, and furthermore, any occurring Miscellaneous Doctrines will often base their existence upon them.

Subscription - For the adherence spectrum's evaluation procedure, a doctrine is counted as being subscribed to if, and only if, it is subscribed to by a person, and in addition, they do not subscribe to one or more other doctrines (i.e. typically non-belief system doctrines) that in effect negate the doctrine. If a person subscribes to any non-belief system doctrines that don't negate any adherence spectrum included doctrines, those non-belief system doctrines do not have an effect on determining the person's adherence spectrum classification. To "not subscribe" to a doctrine means that a person knows what a doctrine states, and makes a conscious decision/determination to not accept it, give credence to it, or to not strive to conduct themselves according to it. A person who professes to subscribe to a doctrine, but consciously and habitually acts in a manner that is in opposition to what is stated in the doctrine, is evaluated as not subscribing to the doctrine.

Determinability - Whether a person subscribes to a doctrine or not might not be determinable for a number of reasons. One reason being that the person does not know about the doctrine's existence (usually not a relevant reason in an instance of the person participating in a formal evaluation, since the person would at that time become aware of the doctrine's existence and can consider it and might decide if they subscribe to it or not). In which case, subscription to the doctrine is evaluated as undetermined. Another situation is that at the time of determination regarding a given doctrine, a person decides, or has previously decided, to not take a position on the doctrine. In these cases the person is evaluated as not subscribing to the doctrine; though if appropriate even though not subscribing to the doctrine, they may be noted as observing or practicing the doctrine. They are considered as not subscribing to the doctrine because, from a logical perspective, if a person is thinking about whether they accept and give credence to something or not, they are not accepting and giving credence to it at the time when they trying to decide whether to do so or not; and a doctrine can not be subscribed to if it is not accepted and given credence. If a person later decides to subscribe to the doctrine, the person will then be considered as subscribing to it; the same for a person who previously had not known of a doctrine's existence so was previously considered undetermined, might after learning about the document decide to subscribe to it. However, in all cases of decisions to subscribe to a doctrine, the ultimate determination concerning subscription to a dctrines, as previously mentioned, also takes into account the factors of actions, and contradictory beliefs. Finally, if the person's stance on a doctrine is not known for any other reason besides the preceding reasons, subscription to the doctrine is evaluated as undetermined.

Accuracy - For the results of adherence spectrum's evaluation process to be accurate, it is important for a person's position on as many as possible of the Foundational and Secondary Doctrines of the relevant belief system be determined. If it is determined that a person subscribes to all of the Foundational doctrines of a belief system, and less than a significant number of Secondary Doctrines are evaluated as undetermined, that fact should be noted along with the evaluation results. If instead, all of the Foundational Doctrines are subscribed to, and a significant number of Secondary doctrines are undetermined, the evaluation results are considered preliminary, pending further clarification; in which case the the most accurate determination that can be given is to determine/confirm whether the person can accurately be considered an adopter of the relevant belief system or not, and not more precisely where along the adherence spectrum they might fall. If one or more Foundational Doctrines are undetermined, a valid evaluation result can not be produced, even if all of the other Foundational and Secondary doctrines of the belief system are subscribed to.

The generic version of the adherence spectrum is shown below. The adherence spectrum contains two main groupings who’s names occur above its line, “The Left”, and “The Right”, and below the line are the names of all of the adherence spectrum's, categories; which consist of sub-groupings of the main groups plus an additional classification of “nominals”.

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