@gitcarver,

Sorry, that doesn’t make it any less bizarre/irrational in my opinion.

Under prior law (note that there was no change in Title VII so we are talking about court-made law) it was fine for the employer to accommodate those with medical issues while requiring others claiming a religious belief to participate in programs required of other employees (e.g. biometric scanning). But recently we’ve seen things like this.

It gets really fun when employees amalgamate religions and claim they should receive time off for observance of religious festivals affiliated with religions not practiced for centuries – or observances that are anti-religious. To avoid liability, the employer is stuck with agreeing to the request.

If you read the decision, the guy was not saying that the scanner would place the “mark of the beast” on his hand at this time, but rather the system itself was part of a path that would lead to it imprinting the “mark of the beast.”

The man did not want to step onto the path and therefore declined to participate in the system due to religious reasons.

It is also interesting to me that his union filed a complaint but then withdrew it after they discovered they had bargained away the right for religious accommodations.

Biometric scanning involves scanning biological entities, NOT electronic ones ( RFID chips ).
Think retina, fingerprint, palm print, foot print, facial recognition, etc.

Then I’m back to total confusion.

I just don’t get these bizarre claims regarding beliefs about “the mark of the beast”

The mark of the beast is very explicitly described in Revelations. This doesn’t even come close.

What really gets me is that a lot of this comes from people who claim to believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible, but then they go off into left field with strange non-literal interpretations of Revelations trying to match it up to current events.

Court opinion has no mention of any chip or RFID. It reads: “In the summer of 2012, Consol implemented a biometric hand-scanner system at the mine, in order to better monitor the attendance and work hours of its employees. The scanner system required each employee checking in or out of a shift to scan his or her right hand; the shape of the right hand was then linked to the worker’s unique personnel number.” The medical exception the company had made, according to the opinion, was for two employees whose hand injuries prevented them from using the scanning device. Nothing about chips, again.

An RFID chip? That makes more sense. From Walter’s blurb, I was thinking a palm print scan.