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The problem is that you can get any kind of exemption based on religious beliefs.


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.


> 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.


That might not be reasonable to you, but that's completely different from the reasonable standard under the law.

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.


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.

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...


You could answer that yourself. To qualify this first ask what are the criteria for a person to establish a valid religious exemption request and then what are the criteria for a regulating body or employer to deny the exemption according to that criteria.

Here is a brief example from the American Bar Association: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

Also, some institutions have much wider latitude to deny a variety of religious exemption requests than other due to environmental hazards and safety concerns.


This is the opposite of what your prior comment said. Your prior comment says that exemption requests require approval regardless of the merits.

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.


Sikhs (Khalsa) are also technically obliged to carry a knife around at all times.

There are, however, constraints on these accomodations driven by job and safety requirements -- see for instance https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2011-...:

"... there are circumstances where a tight-fitting respirator must be worn, such as when a worker is exposed to an atmosphere that is immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH), defined as "...an atmosphere that poses an immediate threat to life, would cause irreversible adverse health effects, or would impair an individual's ability to escape from a dangerous atmosphere." 29 CFR 1910.134(b). In these situations, a tight-fitting pressure demand respirator is required. Wearing a respirator that is less protective could pose a grave danger not only to the worker who is wearing it, but also to other workers who might be called on to rescue him from the IDLH atmosphere. Preventing these unnecessary risks is a compelling governmental interest that justifies OSHA's decision not to provide a religious exemption from the respirator standard, especially as there is no less restrictive way to provide this protection."


Which is funny because people who actually work with this tech know well that facial hair is no obstacle to rigorously functional respirator use. This is more of a cultural tradition such as how genital mutilation of infant boys is necessary for health when it really took off as a way of adding value to birth support service invoices.

Wow, talk about a change of subject.

Can you provide an example? The undue burden, safety issues, etc tend to strike down most requests that are unusual.

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.

"[...] so tiresome. " I only wrote very basic Atheist concepts. If that is tiresome to you, I dont know, what else.

" Catholics amount to a minority of people making up postliberal trends, " I cited a bigger group of people who have a problem with the liberal Popper. You can call Marxist classical postliberalism.

" e Catholics spend a lot of their time arguing not quite from "Jesus who was invented 1950 years ago" but from Aristotelian concepts " I doubt it. Most catholics I've met dont do it. Sorry. And I doubt that most Catholics do any deep philosophical statement at all. You can ask them how I could disapprove their belief. You wouldnt get an answer, sometimes a very angry reaction.


No, your post wasn't "basic atheism" (a basic atheist probably wouldn't write anything there at all) but New Atheism, which was such a web community-spoiling scene and thankfully peaked and declined nearly two decades ago though you apparently didn't go the memo.

Most Catholics you have met are immaterial, because the OP distinctly mentioned postliberalism. If you want to bring up Catholics here, then the Catholics who would bother to identify with postliberalism, which is after all a stance of political philosophy, are largely those Catholics of a philosophical bent, and that is why one hears a lot of Aristotle in defense of their political and social models. I have my own disagreements with Catholics because I am not sympathetic to many claims of Aristotelianism, but on HN facts matter.


" our post wasn't "basic atheism" (a basic atheist probably wouldn't write anything there at all) but New Atheism, which was such a web community-spoiling scene and thankfully peaked and declined nearly two decades ago though you apparently didn't go the memo. " You mean people like Kazimierz Łyszczyński (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_%C5%81yszczy%C5%84sk... ) or the growing atheism in the Arab world ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy3JuwGJWBE ) ? I didnt get the memo? In my country Catholism is losing constantly people and English use net was not a thing back then.

" Most Catholics you have met are immaterial " Most Catholics just suck what they learned during child hood. They are postliberal as they wish a Catholic society which is hence not liberal. Arguing with Aristoteles is just plain sane washing as the bible is intellectuelly very thin.


Just chiming in: I upvoted both the post you replied to and the post it was replying to. All of yours got the thumbs down. No one appointed you the order police and this entire train was net-negative.



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