81–90 of 255 posts
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Think of a religion more like a union
My point would still stand. Nobody should be given additional rights and protections under the law by virtue of being a member of a union (or political party or corporation or anything else).
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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.
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.
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So you wouldn't object if someone followed you to every restaurant and collected your fingerprints off the glasses you use? You wouldn't be a bit creeped out by that? Something doesn't have to be a secret for it to feel private.
So you wouldn't object if someone followed you to every restaurant I think most readers stopped here.
Time to start the Church of Not Getting Fingerprinted so that we can all get exempted.
The Satanic Temple has been pushing to use religious exemptions around laws such as Texas' recent abortion law. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Sata...
And since it's a new/fake religion, their beliefs are a blank slate which can be adapted to whichever liberty or situation presents itself. They are daring the courts to call their belief insincere--something the courts are rightly trepidatious about deciding what constitutes bona-fide belief.
It's pretty much the religious exceptionist's worst nightmare--a parody religion set up to leech off any religious benefits or exclusions. Okay, you don't believe in birth control? Well I don't believe in blood transfusions/cancer/insulin. Your move, Christians.
Time to start the Church of Not Getting Fingerprinted so that we can all get exempted.
Good. Religious exemptions are pragmatic canaries for state overreach. People are not livestock, even if states and employers like to treat them that way. The idea of a religious exemption isn't just some pastafarian variation, it represents a very real line between the individual and group and whether one is a citizen or mere property. This is the marking issue with biometrics. Are you a being with agency, or are yo…
Religious exemptions shouldn't be a thing though. I should not get more protections or rights in any way than another citizen because I happen to have or claim different beliefs than them. I'm not talking about being discriminated against because of religious beliefs, mind you. I'm talking about the right to do or refuse something (e.g., refuse a fingerprint or, or refuse to serve alcohol) and protection of those cho…
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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.
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.
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> The idea of a religious exemption isn't just some pastafarian variation Anyone’s assumptions or thoughts can qualify as a religion. At least for any consistent and useful definition of religion.
And in the united states it does. A religion is any deeply held belief. That's the only standard.
I deeply believe in the existence of gravity. I guess that makes me a Scientitian.
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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…
> 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 agai…
Apparently it was a widely-held Native American religious belief: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8380/did-some-c...
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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…
> 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 agai…
It's legal to not have a driver's license, if one does not drive on public roads.