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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 i

• lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > 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.
  • iammisc 5y ago
    And in the united states it does. A religion is any deeply held belief. That's the only standard.
    • ryandrake 5y ago
      But where do you draw the line? What if I have a deeply held religious belief that human sacrifice is required by god? Can I then go around killing people? There’s got to be some kind of limit.
      • wyattpeak 5y ago
        There are plenty of lines around what rights a genuinely held belief entitles you to. What the parent is saying is that there is no line between religious and other deeply-held beliefs.
      • judge2020 5y ago
        You draw the line at taxes. > Members of certain religious groups (including the Amish and Mennonites) may be exempt from paying Social Security taxes. To become exempt, they must: > Be a member of a religious sect that makes a reasonable provision of food, shelter and medical care for its dependent members and has done so continuously since December 31, 1950; https://faq.ssa.gov/en-us/Topic/article/KA-02411 https://faq.ssa.gov/en-us/Topic/article/KA-02411
      • iammisc 5y ago
        There is endless jurisprudence on this topic. Basically the government draws the line at where your beliefs affect others and there are different levels of urgency the government must show to trample on religious rights depending on the risk to the counterparty.
        • colejohnson66 5y ago
          This. If my beliefs/“religion” say I can’t be fingerprinted, that’s fine. But if my beliefs say I need to sacrifice newborn babies on an altar, that’s not ok, and I will be charged with murder.
        • jobigoud 5y ago
          > Basically the government draws the line at where your beliefs affect others Circumcision shows that this is not even the case.
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
    • jhgb 5y ago
      > A religion is any deeply held belief. I deeply believe in the existence of gravity. I guess that makes me a Scientitian.
      • iammisc 5y ago
        And if a civic action depended on your belief in gravity, which was a belief the government did not share, then this would be relevant.
  • Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    And they rarely do in countries that award special privileges to “religions”. It all comes down to whether some court, quite arbitrarily, rules whether one's convictions are a “religion” or not, and if they be, one may derive special privileges from it.
• Dylan16807 5y ago
  Hang on there. Allowing religious exemptions, and only religious exemptions, is a tiny fraction of the way to getting actual non-coerced consent.
  • williamtrask 5y ago
    That has its benefits given that anyone could otherwise just make up beliefs on the spot to suit their need. Religion requires a bit more institutionalisation and weight.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
      When it comes to biometrics, why is it bad if I decide on the spot I'm not okay with it, as opposed to having decided as part of an institution?
      • beerandt 5y ago
        It shouldn't, but the organized religions have largely held their ground on principle, when others have given up rights for broken promises of safety, or equality, or "for the greater good," but most of all, because they think it'll only apply to others or be used in a limited scope. And that's never the case.
    • alasdair_ 5y ago
      There often (not always) is no functional way to tell the difference between a belief made up on the spot and a “religious” belief.
    • ithacaman 5y ago
      How is that distinction constitutional? Privately held beliefs are illegitimate unless they are held with a registered institution?
• throwawaylinux 5y ago
  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 choices.
  • williamtrask 5y ago
    Think of a religion more like a union
    • throwawaylinux 5y ago
      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).
      • mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Because democracy is not a tyranny of the majority, this will likely not happen, since life has so many shades of gray.
    • seattle_spring 5y ago
      Corrupt and thoroughly outdated?
  • throwthere 5y ago
    I agree with you on principal but the courts have kind of interpreted the free exercise clause of the first amendment broadly by 2021 standards and there's not really any going back.
    • ithacaman 5y ago
      Sure there is. That's what amendments are for.
• ethbr0 5y ago
  > taking things from you under duress or coercion is not consent This was his job. With his private sector employer. Who paid him money in exchange for services. Someone being forced to resign because their work requirements are incompatible with their beliefs is part of having a moral code. You're not entitled to be able to work in a specific job. Refusing to being tracked with an identifier, when you're working in a security sensitive job, is absolutely "an undue hardship" on your employer. And the idea that alternative accommodations for a background check exist is bullshit. By definition, they all boil down to attesting to your identity + searching for a certain class of records against that identity. (I'm all for creating equality by leveling the playing field for things outside of individual's control, but at some point, you're harming everyone else's equality by making bad-faith... faith claims)
  • bigiain 5y ago
    > This was his job. With his private sector employer. Who paid him money in exchange for services. Who then changed the agreement from not even mentioning requiring fingerprinting to absolutely requiring it. That's the most egregious bad-faith example in this story. If a business can arbitrarily declare "You now all need to pass background checks including fingerprinting to keep your jobs", what's to stop them saying "You now need to accept getting paid half of what we'd agreed to when you were employed"? There was an employment agreement, the employer wished to add conditions to that after the agreement was reached between the two parties. And there apparent "re negotiation" of that agreement was the company saying "OK, you're fired". And the EEOC and the court both decided that was not OK. Which seems like the right outcome to me, regardless of whether the "religious discrimination" makes any sense or not. I'd totally expect the prosecution lawyers to play whatever the strongest argument the law had available to them. I would totally let a lawyer convince me it was appropriate to claim I have a christian belief and that part of that means I do not want to be fingerprinted, if that allowed them to use the most powerful legal argument against an employer who had arbitrarily and capriciously fired me on the spot for resisting being fingerprinted to keep the job I'd had to 16 months without that requirement.
    • akerl_ 5y ago
• kgc 5y ago
  Could someone just start a religion that disallows taxation and stop paying taxes?
  • aaron_m04 5y ago
    I very much doubt that any government would allow that, for obvious reasons.
    • Blikkentrekker 5y ago
      There are other somewhat similar cases however. In Finland, conscription may be avoided by being a Jehova's witness, that sole religion, on the basis of that it is a non-violent religion, ignoring that many other religions have similar tenants, and many non-religious people are also deeply pacifist who are still conscript. — That sole religion, so named, is exempted from conscription. And one only need prove membership, not prove that one actually holds those non-violent beliefs to be exempt.
      • PostThisTooFast 5y ago
        "other religions have similar tenants" TENETS. The word is "tenets."
      • jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
        It's unfortunate that one needs to make up a god to be exempt from the some of the most awful governmental abuses like conscription, but I'd rather have such an exemption than not have it at all.
• tomtimtall 5y ago
  > The point of privacy laws are that your consent is required, and taking things from you under duress or coercion is not consent. This seems like your taking it a bit to the extreme. We both agree that for me to hire you to do a job I’m allowed to know who you are right? And that to identify the one person out of the world population I am allowed to keep a record with enough details that I can identify if a person is in fact you, right? Now if my bookeping of people changes from “roughly visually resembles the same person” which we both agree is a rubbish measure if any kind of security is involved to “has known fingerprint” and you refuse to comply, why then should I not be allowed to fire the person who I can no-longer identify out of the world population? You have complete freedom to not want people to see your face or know your fingerprint, but you just cannot take away the freedom of a potential employer to be able to identify who you are by the means they decide.
  • adrianba 5y ago
    In most states in the United States, the notion of consent in the employment context is very different than, say, European privacy law. In European law, consent from an employee is almost impossible to obtain for any significant decision because of the inherent power imbalance in an employment relationship. However, in the United States, where most employees are employed "at will," deciding to remain an employee is often considered to be consent. The law considers that you have choice: you choose to work there and consent, or you chose to not work there. In this story, it appears that there is a separate law considering religious freedom and not privacy that requires employers to make some accommodations when not too burdensome.
  • foerbert 5y ago
    This, alone, is not the full picture. It's trivially easy to get into utter absurdity. What if an employer decides they can only identify people by surgically grafting special ID cards to their foreheads? There is - obviously - more at play here than simply the right of the employer to identify employees by any means they wish. There is some level of reasonableness here as well. This moves the argument into murkier grounds, as now we have to figure out how reasonable fingerprints are in any given situation.
• blunte 5y ago
  Religion is as much bullshit as most political parties are. It's a few people trying to control and profit off masses. I we humans were half as rational and scientific as we believe ourselves, we would put energy into proving or disproving religious beliefs. But that is taboo, or rather it is off limits since so much of formerly ill gotten monies are now available to fight against such investigations.
  • blunte 5y ago
    Oh I've angered the sheep. My apologies. You are being manipulated and controlled, and my commentary about this is not nearly as significant as the loss of your self worth in (willfully ignorantly) following your leaders.
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• anigbrowl 5y ago
  It's actually not great, although I agree with you on several points. to be sure, people are not livestock. But first, I'm not a member of any organized religion, so even though I might find something acceptable I can't invoke a religious exception since my unique spiritual outlook is unlikely to meet any court's threshold of acceptability. Second, I honestly think this guy's religious claim is bullshit. There's no Christian stricture on concealing your identity, and given that the fingerprint was sought pursuant to a background check, I can even come up with a religious argument for why he should have complied (Matthew 22:22). So while I support this guy's desire nt to be fingerprinted as a matter of human dignity, I don't think a religious exemption is the way to do it. Those have instead become a catch-all excuse for overtly religious people to opt out of things they don't like without having to meet the same threshold of legal credibility as others.
• PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  I agree, but "religion" shouldn't be the only mechanism for objecting to that kind of personal violation. On the other hand, if you work on company property with company equipment, that company can, at any time, take your fingerprints off of said equipment; just as it can access communications performed on their equipment or record you as you roam around company property. So what is really being accomplished here? "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." PLEASE SHOVE YOUR DISRESPECT FOR YOUR USERS UP YOUR ASS, HACKER NEWS.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dehrmann 5y ago
  There are pop-up churches giving religious exceptions to the covid vaccine. People are clearly using using religious exemptions as a loophole for "but I don't wanna."
  • motohagiography 5y ago
    By "don't wanna," do you mean decline to consent?