Imagine your neighbor installs a bright light that shines directly into your bedroom at night. He tells you it's a ward against evil. When you complain that it's keeping you awake, he responds, "I don't have to justify my personal beliefs." You don't care what he privately believes. You care that you can't sleep.
Another neighbor was the first on the block to install one. His light only illuminates his own yard. "I'm just following what the brochure says," he explains. Your neighbor says the same thing, but they can't agree on what the instructions actually mean. Meanwhile, the second neighbor's light has never bothered you.
At what point are you entitled to question their beliefs? Are the beliefs still purely personal when their consequences affect you?
Now imagine your neighbor starts lobbying the HOA. Soon, everyone in the neighborhood is required to install these lights. The entire policy rests on his testimony about their evil-repelling properties and a sales brochure from 1991. When evidence emerges that the lights may actually cause headaches, the HOA refuses to reconsider.
The second neighbor asks if he can keep his light as he had it before so that it only illuminates his yard and doesn't disrupt the local insects too much.
No. The HOA president is friends with your neighbor, and most residents have already been convinced that the wide-angle lights are essential and find his interpretation of the brochure most sensible.
You point out that the lights don't seem to do anything.
"They provide a deeper kind of protection that can't be measured."
Then how can you prove they are working?
"You can't prove they aren't though."
If they ward off evil, why has the neighborhood had an uptick of break-ins and maulings?
"Perhaps their protection works by allowing bad things to happen for reasons we can't understand."
Could we at least demand better evidence before making these mandatory?
"Why are you discriminating against people who want to ward off evil? My wife's boyfriend has used these for decades, are you calling him a liar?"
Meanwhile, you still can't sleep. Your kids get headaches. You can't understand why your neighbors are so convinced, and you just want the light out of your window.
Bonus after-credits scene - The lights become so entrenched that better lighting technology is dismissed as incompatible with the neighborhood's sacred traditions. Research stalls and innovation is discouraged. The insect population, already on its knees, plummets further due to light pollution. generations continue living under an inferior system because questioning it has become socially unacceptable. This is a caricature, but there are ripple effects.
Your neighbors are free to believe in spiritual protection and install whatever lights they want on their own property provided they respect others' rights.
When you try to impose rules on everyone else while treating the beliefs underlying those rules as exempt from scrutiny, that isn't going to work.
This should be obvious, but your right to believe in something without evidence is not everyone else's obligation to live by it.