Christian miner who refused ‘Mark of the Beast’ Antichrist biometric hand scanner awarded $150K

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I think this person must be confused about scanning versus printing, or mb implanting chips or RFIDs or something. His tooth radio told him this was the work of the devil, so…

My personal religion revolves around everyone in America paying me just one dollar. Oh and also paying absolutely no taxes whatsoever (including sales and or VAT taxes). Now, everyone give me a buck or I’m suing for $350 million or so.

It’ll be a great day when these stone age/bronze age/iron age ‘religions’ are quaint social clubs like the Rotary or Kiwanis. Sky daddy isn’t really talking to you on the tooth radio, distasteful cartoons are not a license to murder, etc. Make this one life count, be kind and good and courteous even to religious cranks (but paying him $150k? wow, where’s mine?!)

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It pretty much is, is it not?

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Especially if you sell biometric imaging equipment to HR people…

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And yet Amazon can apparently force all those employees to not get paid for long security checks. Guess those employees need to play the religion card.

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Just as with religion, I bet there is someone way, way too much into Rotary; getting all upset about “the mark of Kiwanis”.

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I call that a paycheck.

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I curious if the mine had folded this hand scan into their tag in/out system that tells them who’s underground and who’s on the surface.

I’m speculating here, but if the mine operator was forced to keep an old fashioned board of brass tags just for one guy I could see how that would compromise safety.

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I sincerely believe that compelling employees to use biometric authentication is wrong.

But I have no religious mumbo-jumbo on which my belief is based.

So what am I, chopped liver?

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Isn’t the misunderstanding of demonstrable facts pretty much the basis for all religion? haha

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I would be very surprised if a miner had an iPhone. Or any Apply product, for that matter.

Hell, I would be surprised if a Miner had Internet in his home.

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Forgive my ignorance of what the Bible “actually” says, but conceptually, I don’t see why the mark of the beast has to be an actual physical mark. I mean, we’re talking about bullshit bananas Jesus freaks here. A mark on the soul doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to me.

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Colanders on heads for license photos?

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The source articles indicate the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the case for the miner. Since the EEOC declines to find cause, must less sue, on most EEOC charges, it must have determined the company’s actions violated the religious discrimination prohibitions of the Civil Rights Act. The issue is not whether the employee’s belief is accurate/accepted/popular, etc., but whether it is sincerely held; and whether any requested accommodation of that belief is reasonable. In this case, it appears fairly simple, alternative means of tracking were available.

What if an employer refused to allow a male Sikh to wear his turban or maintain his beard? On one hand, some would say the turban is just a hat. On the other hand, why not let him wear a turban in the Company colors?

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I was trying really, really hard to avoid going there. Let’s say “easily demonstrable, widely agreed upon facts.”

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Seems like a stretch to me, seeing as the passage specifically refers to physical marks on the hand or forehead.

The court cannot tell you what your beliefs should be, that isn’t the issue, the issue is that there is ZERO evidence that anything was being done to him that would violate his beliefs, any such ruling should be based off of facts and evidence. His assumption is based off of complete ignorance about the device in question, and he raised enough of a s stink about something he knew absolute nothing about to refuse to comply with the mines safety protocol. The biometric scanners are there for the safety of the minors to keep track of who is in and out of the mines. The mine was fully justified in firing this moron.

Could you please verify for the court the existence of a soul, show the mark left on said soul, and explain how a machine that essentially takes a picture of your hand marks the soul? Since the machine doesn’t even touch your hand, why couldn’t this non contact soul marking technology be incorporated into satellites and mark everyone from space, how would one know if they are marked, surly you can’t sue for a preexisting mark? Burden of proof. The legal system can’t be based off of mumbo jumbo. This is absolute madness and the court should be ashamed and the judge who made that ruling disbarred.

When rulings like this pass, what is to stop me from suing you personally for $150k because I believe that your comment here on this message board is embedded with invisible soul marking encoding that only enochian beings can see that violate my religious beliefs? When you remove the burden of proof, you open the door to absolute madness.

This EXACT thing happened a few years back, a handful of employees were fired because they couldn’t wear safety helmets over their turbans. The court ruled in the company’s favor, because they weren’t Christians.

Again, there is zero evidence that a biometric scanner, which just takes a picture of your hand leaves any mark, because it doesn’t. So this guy is refusing the mine’s safety protocols out of a combination of ignorance and crazy, not a physical disability, nor a religious belief, the bible doesn’t mention biometric scanners that is his own personal crazy and ignorance about the device. What if he though merely entering the mine would mark him? Where do you draw the line?

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Where are the clowns?

Send in the clowns…

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What if my religious beliefs dictated that I should only refer to black people as the n-word, and my employer fired me for doing so? Reductio ad absurdum! In other words, this opens up a significant can of worms.

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A defeat for rational and critical thinking, but a victory against having beliefs imposed upon on your sincerely held ones.

But as comforting as the freedom to be sincerely wrong is, somehow I doubt this would have gone in the miner’s favor if that scanner was peripherally against his Muslim or Hindu beliefs.

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(I have to apologize right off the bat because, as I sometimes do on a thread with a fair bit of content, I’ve responded directly to one person but this post contains a somewhat stream of consciousness response to a lot of things in this thread because it flows well.)

Well, I can’t speak for the rest of the U.S. population but in my background Beverly’s type of complaint wasn’t that out of the mainstream. Of course, watching the history of my background going back as far as the 50s (I’m not nearly that old but my family has been fundamentalist going at least that far back), it also wasn’t so out of the mainstream to think that the fancy 2d barcodes on the back of drivers licenses, UPC barcodes, credit card numbers, and social security numbers were the mark of the beast, and that you should bury bibles in the back yard in case the commies took over and confiscated all bibles.

The trouble with accommodating everyone who thinks something is the mark of the beast is that there’s always a new mark of the beast.

This is not equivalent to accommodating Sikhs wearing turbans and keeping hair untrimmed. Nor is it equivalent to accommodating Muslims who pray five times a day or who want to wear a headscarf, burqa, niqab, etc. It’s also not equivalent to people who want to keep kosher.

Those things are clear and an integral, daily part of some adherents’ faiths. (Somewhat unrelated note: In most cases, none of these things pose any meaningful consequence to the people doing the accommodating either.)

As a former Christian of a very similar stripe to Beverly Butcher’s, I don’t think the constant shifting definitions of the mark of the beast are comparable. If Beverly wants to feel persecuted, I assure you (based on personal experience!) it won’t matter in the slightest whether Beverly is accommodated or not.

Is the accommodation worthwhile in comparison to the reasons for the biometric hand scanner? I really doubt it. I haven’t seen the filings but I can imagine that the mine’s rationale had to do with making sure that in the event of an accident they really knew who they should be looking for to make sure their workers were safely rescued. That’s a real, concrete goal that is best served by biometric data.

Beverly’s concern is provably false. The scanner can be disassembled and proven to have no printer, invisible tattoo gun, or mechanism for injection in it. Even on the basis of the mentality I grew up with, this device is innocuous. You can complain but have no legitimate basis for complaint when an employer records something about you that the god you believe in made unique.

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lloydcogliandro,

If you did have a sincere religious objection to signing your name then I’d expect your employer shouldn’t find it hard to accommodate that.

redesigned,

Perhaps he was mistaken in whether it violated his beliefs, though that’s not really a defence for the company if they didn’t do a proper job of explaining why it didn’t violate his beliefs instead of simple firing him when he refused.

As for the safety helmet issue the key phrase is “reasonable accommodations”. Having employees walking around without legally required safety gear is not reasonable.

Shuck,

The US constitution means gives religious beliefs more weight, and that weight shouldn’t depend on whether they’re mainstream.

And it’s not forcing other people to accept those beliefs, it’s just asking employers to respect their employers beliefs. And the limits depend on the ability to make reasonable accommodations. One could argue that the public health risk from unvaccinated people means you don’t get a religious exception.

NickyG,

Reduction ad absurdum is solved by the phrases “sincerely held religious beliefs” and “reasonable accommodations”. Your example likely fails on the first and certainly fails on the second.

I don’t understand why people have such a problem with this ruling. Yes the guy was a nut and a moron, but it was absolutely trivial for the employer to say “We disagree, but if you really feel your religion prohibits it you can just submit manual cards like all these other people who couldn’t use the scanners”.

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