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Not a lawyer, but seems from the outside that they key thing is that another employee did get an alternate background check. So being told no accommodations are available is BS.

Seems like a pretty straightforward argument from there to saying the employee is being discriminated against for a sincerely held religious belief. The belief itself being fringe hogwash is irrelevant.

Plus the employee offering to accept an alternative form of verification seems to point to the belief (however dumb) being sincere.

Ah, must've skimmed past that part! yeah, that seems pretty clear-cut. Thanks!

On the other hand, afaik the mark of the beast is something placed/written on you by the antichrist. Whereas your fingerprints, are, like, part of your body. So even if you grant that the mark of the beast is a thing people believe in this doesn’t make much sense.

I suppose that means that a sincerely held religious belief need not actually be a tenet of the religion you follow, so long as you believe it, and believe it is related to your religion. Personally this seems like a gray area that is ripe for abuse. But I guess until such abuse becomes much more commonplace, we will not see a reform in the degree to which religious beliefs are favored by the courts.

On the other hand, if such abuse becomes more prominent and causes more interference with how business gets done, then you could imagine a scenario where one-off beliefs are much less favored, and the state has to get involved in figuring out whether the belief is actually religious, or if it's just some random thing you believe that you attach religious significance to. (Distinguishing minority religious views from this will be extremely difficult.)

Generally the courts in their wisdom have decided its not the States interest to be pontificating on which religious beliefs are valid and sanctioned and which are not. That would be putting the cart before the horse. If the State gets to decide, then you might as well throw out all religious beliefs. The state is the Church.

Hence the standard that the belief just needs to be deeply held. I know that the knee jerk reaction is to give government more power. But you know, in America the power is with the people still.

If the State and corporations gets to decide what you put in your body, and what God you get to believe in, then the foundational promise of America is dead.

I have my own opinions about the wisdom of the courts. There are plenty of countries where religious beliefs are given far less leeway to interfere with secular contracts and associations, and many of those countries are still fine places to live. IMO, that's the proper place for religion, but there would have to be much abuse before we countenanced going in that direction in the US.

> secular contracts and associations, and many of those countries are still fine places to live.

Sure, that’s a great answer for people who aren’t religious or whose religious practices happen to line up well with secular “contracts and associations”. Not good for devout people though.

Hard to design a policy that is beneficial to all possible folks affected by that policy, especially when the interests of some stakeholders are in conflict.

> something placed/written on you

That is a reasonable and mainstream interpretation, but one has to wonder how someone living in the first century AD would conceptualise a system of biometric surveillance and control, so that they could write about it using the language of the day.

If someone uses their thumbprint to register their identity with their phone, and uses that biometric to unlock a digital copy of a government-issued ID, for example, then it seems almost pedantic to quibble about whether the "mark" is placed or stored on their body, or on their device, or in "the cloud".

Also, the book of Revelation equates "the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name", suggesting that taking a "name" can be equivalently bad to taking a "mark", and that there is a system of assigning numeric (perhaps digital) values to human-readable names.

It is hard to say precisely what constitutes taking a number separately from taking a mark, but I think that a reasonable analogy (even if not a correct interpretation) is a system where people's digital identities are stored under the control of a single global database. The "number" could refer to the digital value of the entire database, or there could be a hierarchical system with a central key exercising authority over regional keys, which exercise authority over per-person keys, like the web PKI only more centralised at the top.

omg stop. This is just sophistry.

There are lots of good arguments against the surveillance state or the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, reverse-engineering 2000 year old religious visions to mean something opposite of their plainly stated text (notwithstanding translation) is neither necessary nor helpful.

Need I remind you that the events of the New Testament start around the time of a Roman census, so the idea of individuals' own names being catalogued by the state was not an unfamiliar concept even back then.

I wasn't trying to suggest that the book of Revelation is the only reason to support the idea of privacy as a fundamental right. It is of course possible for people to support that right for many other good reasons.

However, I'm not sure if the "plainly stated text" of Revelation really has such a clear and unambiguous interpretation. Compare Revelation 19:16 which also talks about someone having a name written on them, which I don't think anyone would take literally, and they certainly wouldn't the previous verse where a sharp sword comes out of someone's mouth to strike down nations.

You may not find these interpretations helpful, but others do, and it's fine to see things differently. Also, you're right that Roman censuses would be well known to individuals living in the first century AD, as was the practice of branding slaves, so these would be natural analogies for the writer to use to convey spiritual truths, and perhaps more complicated as-yet-uninvented systems.

> one has to wonder how someone living in the first century AD would conceptualise a system of biometric surveillance and control

I submit that one does not, in fact, have to wonder that.

Okay, let me rephrase that.

If one believes that the events described in Revelation are events which are destined to occur in our future, and they were written about from the perspective of a man who lived in the first century AD, then it is worth considering the possibility that the events described would involve systems that would be difficult for him to understand and describe in the way that we see them.

Under such a set of assumptions, someone who is interested in interpreting the prophecy should wonder whether biometric surveillance is the sort of system that would be expressed by such a first century writer in the way that the beast system is expressed in Revelation.

> for a sincerely held religious belief.

You can't just let every single human claim whatever they want is a religious belief. To claim that having your likeness captured (whether it's a photo of your face, your foot, your fingers, or whatever) is against your religious beliefs is laughable. Does the person not have no drivers license (their face captured by a camera)?

If we can claim whatever we want, well it's against my religious belief to be fired.

You are cherry picking from the comment (and the article):

> the key thing is that another employee did get an alternate background check

It doesn't matter if it's a religious belief that you approve of or not. The point is it was possible but was not offered as an option for this person.

Nah, you're assuming I'm discussing the case in the article, when in fact I'm just talking about religious belief exemptions in general.

The courts really do not want to get into the bussiness of dictating people's religion. They explicitly do not require that a religious belief be well supported by the text, orthodoxy, or any denomination of the religion. Nor do they require that a religious belief is self consistent or unchanging through time. It is possible to argue that a belief is not sincerly held, but it is very difficult to win such an arguement. As such these legal arguemnts are almost always about what constitutes a 'reasonable accomodation'.

Perpetual employment is not a reasonable accomodation; but if you work in HR at a large company, you could probably get out of handling the firing of other employees.

In practice what this means is that if an employee says they have a strong personal conviction about something, the employer must offer reasonable accomodations if any are available, or be prepared to show that the claim was made in bad faith.

I legitimately knew a ~50 year old person, when I was a child, who believed that having your photograph taken captured part of your soul, and she would not allow her photograph to be taken.

Apparently it was a widely-held Native American religious belief: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8380/did-some-c...

> Does the person not have no drivers license

It's legal to not have a driver's license, if one does not drive on public roads.

It depends. I’m 99% certain the Amish would not approve of fingerprinting. But it’s certainly not a widespread belief among the most popular mainstream Christian sects. However some states allow for a religious exemption that is based on personal belief, so one doesn’t need their pastor or priest to agree.

Hmm, I had no idea one way or the other about the Amish and fingerprints, but you made me curious. Seems it's not so, as in Illinois they worked with the state to avoid getting photographed for their state ID by getting one based on their fingerprints instead.

https://will.illinois.edu/news/story/amish-can-apply-for-sta...

Ironically, the Amish position is based solely on their strong stance on Aniconism[0], but in the process of their objection they have revealed that the state ID system gives people the choice of having their forehead or their right hand recorded, which are precisely the areas where the "mark of the beast" is taken, according to the book of Revelation.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism#Among_Christians_tod...

[1] https://biblehub.com/revelation/13-16.htm

yeah, I'm confused what belief is held such that you can't be fingerprinted. My initial searching for what that might be is mostly "Mark of the Beast". Which seems odd.

The whole of Revelations is certainly odd, but that doesn't stop a whole lot of people from finding some interpretation of it they can believe in. That some people might interpret it to be a warning against biometrics doesn't strike me as particularly odd, relative to the oddness of other beliefs derived from [or justified using] this book.

Fingerprinting could not in any way be interpreted as the "mark of the beast" because there is no mark put on the person during fingerprinting. So that wouldn't stand any scrutiny. Religious or otherwise.

You have to be careful when you interpret a religious passage.

For starters you don't (do you?) speak the original language, so you're at the mercy of the translator for the term "mark"

But, going more meta, most religious traditions don't have a strict textual interpretation of their texts. Certainly the author could not have known fingerprinting techniques 2000 years ago. It is not unreasonable to interpret "mark" to be an identifier.

Of course then the "fingerprint" mark would have to be compatible with the rest of Revelations.

> Certainly the author could not have known fingerprinting techniques 2000 years ago.

Citation needed.

> It is not unreasonable to interpret "mark" to be an identifier.

Adding an identifier, perhaps. But to interpret that passage to refer to taking pictures or imprints? That is unreasonable.

The government will not and can not look into the provenance of your belief.

Whether or not this is an 'actual christian belief' is not something the federal or state government can comment on.

If the man holds it sincerely then the state must take him at his word.

Edit: why am I being down voted ...? This is the accepted legal standard

That’s orthogonal to court, the standard is not whether others hold that belief but whether the belief is sincerely held.

Given that he identifies as Christian and whatever he believes got a ruling in his favor I would say that it’s an “actual” belief.

It is a religion, with many denominations. Not quite sure what the criteria is for when something varies such that it wouldn't be considered Christian.

> It is a religion, with many denominations.

The whole of it defies neat categorization. People who self-describe as Christians can't even universally agree which texts are authentic and holy and which are heretical frauds. The only thing they all universally share is the inclination to call themselves Christians (more than a few are eager to contest whether other self-described Christians are in fact Christians.)

One particular example: I was raised to believe that the Book of Mormon is a heretical fraud, and consequently to believe that Mormons are not real Christians (despite claiming to be.)

> People who self-describe as Christians can't even universally agree which texts are authentic and holy and which are heretical frauds. The only thing they all universally share is the inclination to call themselves Christians.

Interesting perspective- when I was much younger, I was taught that a Christian is anybody who believes that Christ is the Savior and that he atoned for the sins of humanity. Is there an "official" definition?

There is no criteria. Anyone who calls themselves Christian is a Christian. The same goes for any other religion. All religions have differing internal beliefs, so there is no objective definition of a “true believer.”

I believe it's not the same for any other religion. For example conversions to Judaism are overseen by a religious court.

An actual court in the US will probably not try to legislate whether a person is of the Jewish faith or not, _regardless_ of what some other religious "court" says.

Probably (IANAL) if a person says that they observe the Jewish faith and that this is a deeply held belief, regardless of whether some religious organization recognizes him/her, that will be enough for the courts.

Sorry, I was talking from the believer's point of view; not from a law perspective. You are probably right about that.

It doesn't matter whether it's "considered" Christian or not. All that matters legally is whether it's a sincerely held religious belief.

How could a court possibly establish whether or not a belief is sincerely held? The whole thing is a farce.

The same way the courts decide whether or not someone committed a crime or any other issue. The judge or jury ultimately decides the facts based on what is presented.

Depending on the Christian denomination there may be explicit provision for personal conscience in interpreting certain things within the context of your faith.

Let's face it: The company did the right thing for its clients getting rid of a dumb-ass, even if it cost them $65K.

Unless, of course, it was all a ruse to simply avoid being fingerprinted (and one would think that the company would've sought evidence... such as church attendance... of being a "devout Christian"). In that case... not such a dṳmb-ȧṡs.