You actually cannot. There are standards to meet to qualify as a true religious exemption. There have been many court cases where people tried to claim religious beliefs when convenient for them, which were denied because they couldn’t meet the threshold for being a real religious belief.
There are also limitations on what accommodations can be requested. If you took a job mowing lawns and then had a religious belief against harming living plants, you wouldn’t collect paychecks while you watched your coworkers mow lawns. They would have to find other work for you if they could, like raking leaves or lawnmower maintenance. If they didn’t have that work, then you wouldn’t have a job.
The raking leaves example was to make a point. For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.
I didn't make myself clear. I'm against the concept of asking for exception from something based on your religious beliefs. I didn't mean that you can ask for virtually anything.
> For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.
Plenty of programmers don't work at a reasonable standard; See, for example, every security incident ever, proliferation of slow electron apps, commercial software that flat-out doesn't work properly.
I’m glad you’ve never written any bugs into your software. If only we could all be that perfect.
However the standard for performance is relative to reasonable expectations for someone in that role. Typically relative to peers within the company. If one person is unable to do their job to within a reasonable level relative their peers even with reasonable accommodations, accommodations do not require the company to continue employing them anyway.
This is not true. The accommodation is only possible if it doesn't present undue hardship, safety concerns, etc. Plenty of accommodations can be denied on those grounds.
I disagree. At the moment religious exemptions are almost always granted only to the majority religions, or at least views that the majority religions find acceptable. If you started applying the law fairly the whole thing would immediately fall apart.
- Jehovah’s Witnesses and others refusing to swear oaths, even in court
Of course many of these had to be fought for in court, but courts are very amenable to the earnestly held beliefs of minority religious groups in the US. We don’t have a state religion.
It creates inequality. For some reason we accept that following a morality framework based on a bunch of presuppositions puts you in a special box (well, I don't accept it). Like, why am I forced to be sent to a meat grinder and kill people? Just because I'm not ultra orthodox something?
This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.
Sorry you can define criteria how to find a better understanding of the world. E.g. Popper did it (as he asked the innocent question if one is aloud to disprove your theory)
It pisses lots of people including Marxist, Nazis, Gender Study Theorists, Catholics, as all of them believe stuff which they dont like to disapprove.
Your statement smells like Catholic rhetoric so I am happy to announce the truth is there is no god. Jesus was not his son and he was certainly not reborn. Just some folks who invented this story 1950 years ago.
Your last paragraph is out of order and sounds like the kind of dig that made Usenet and so many early-millennium web forums so tiresome. Catholics amount to a minority of people making up postliberal trends, and many of those who are Catholics spend a lot of their time arguing not quite from "Jesus who was invented 1950 years ago" but from Aristotelian concepts that became a popular intellectual framework within Western Christianity. I say all this as someone who is neither Catholic, nor would call himself postliberal.
You actually cannot. There are standards to meet to qualify as a true religious exemption. There have been many court cases where people tried to claim religious beliefs when convenient for them, which were denied because they couldn’t meet the threshold for being a real religious belief.
There are also limitations on what accommodations can be requested. If you took a job mowing lawns and then had a religious belief against harming living plants, you wouldn’t collect paychecks while you watched your coworkers mow lawns. They would have to find other work for you if they could, like raking leaves or lawnmower maintenance. If they didn’t have that work, then you wouldn’t have a job.
The raking leaves example was to make a point. For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.
I didn't make myself clear. I'm against the concept of asking for exception from something based on your religious beliefs. I didn't mean that you can ask for virtually anything.
> For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.
Plenty of programmers don't work at a reasonable standard; See, for example, every security incident ever, proliferation of slow electron apps, commercial software that flat-out doesn't work properly.
I’m glad you’ve never written any bugs into your software. If only we could all be that perfect.
However the standard for performance is relative to reasonable expectations for someone in that role. Typically relative to peers within the company. If one person is unable to do their job to within a reasonable level relative their peers even with reasonable accommodations, accommodations do not require the company to continue employing them anyway.
That might not be reasonable to you, but that's completely different from the reasonable standard under the law.
This is not true. The accommodation is only possible if it doesn't present undue hardship, safety concerns, etc. Plenty of accommodations can be denied on those grounds.
Yes, in most cases a religious exemption requires approval after a formal review regardless of the reason or its merits.
Please provide some evidence for your claim. There are plenty of cases out there to show the opposite of what you claim.
https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2026/01/21/ninth-c...
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Which is better than getting no exceptions - if only the two extremes are available.
I disagree. At the moment religious exemptions are almost always granted only to the majority religions, or at least views that the majority religions find acceptable. If you started applying the law fairly the whole thing would immediately fall apart.
That’s not true at all. Many of the most famous religious accommodations in the US are things that mainstream Christians find illogical/absurd:
- Sikhs keeping long hair/beard in the military or police
- Quakers being exempt from the draft
- Quakers, again, refusing to drive with NH plates that say “live free or die,” because they don’t believe that
- Muslims needing breaks to pray 5x/day
- Jews requiring food that follows extremely complex kosher preparation rules
- Native Americans using peyote, a hallucinogen
- Jehovah’s Witnesses and others refusing to swear oaths, even in court
Of course many of these had to be fought for in court, but courts are very amenable to the earnestly held beliefs of minority religious groups in the US. We don’t have a state religion.
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Can you provide an example? The undue burden, safety issues, etc tend to strike down most requests that are unusual.
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How is this a problem? And what would you propose to do about the negative symptoms of the “problem”.
> How is this a problem?
It creates inequality. For some reason we accept that following a morality framework based on a bunch of presuppositions puts you in a special box (well, I don't accept it). Like, why am I forced to be sent to a meat grinder and kill people? Just because I'm not ultra orthodox something?
Some might say this is a feature not a bug of religious freedom
This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.
Sorry you can define criteria how to find a better understanding of the world. E.g. Popper did it (as he asked the innocent question if one is aloud to disprove your theory)
It pisses lots of people including Marxist, Nazis, Gender Study Theorists, Catholics, as all of them believe stuff which they dont like to disapprove.
Your statement smells like Catholic rhetoric so I am happy to announce the truth is there is no god. Jesus was not his son and he was certainly not reborn. Just some folks who invented this story 1950 years ago.
Your last paragraph is out of order and sounds like the kind of dig that made Usenet and so many early-millennium web forums so tiresome. Catholics amount to a minority of people making up postliberal trends, and many of those who are Catholics spend a lot of their time arguing not quite from "Jesus who was invented 1950 years ago" but from Aristotelian concepts that became a popular intellectual framework within Western Christianity. I say all this as someone who is neither Catholic, nor would call himself postliberal.
4 replies →