Theist wins lawsuit because he's "afraid of the devil"

[Silver]

Let’s say you run a business that, like thousands of others, tracks employees’ attendance and work hours. In the old days, you’d use cards and a clock-based machine that stamps workers’ sheets with the date and time of their arrival and departure. To make matters more efficient and bring the whole shebang into the digital age, and to discourage fraud – like workers “buddy-punching” each other’s time cards to illegally inflate hours – you then upgrade to a biometric scanner.



After the changeover, there’s a small problem: One worker refuses to use the scanner. You sit him down and ask what gives. He explains that his non-negotiable objection is of a religious nature: the scanner, he believes, will secretly imprint him with the mark of the Beast.

Are you, as his boss, justified in firing him?

That question was the at the heart of a two-year tug of war between Consol Energy Inc., a natural-gas and coal company out of Philadelphia, and Beverly Butcher Jr., a Consol employee and fundamentalist Christian who worked at a company mine in West Virginia. At some point, the U.S. government got involved: the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against Consol on Butcher’s behalf.

And now we have a jury verdict: Consol has to pay Butcher $150,000 for violating his religious rights.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyath...the-devil/