religion and profession

[cellio]

osewalrus posted an excellent essay on conflicts between religion and one's profession. He and I agree: you are completely free to practice your religion, but if doing so causes complications in your life, you -- not the rest of society -- need to deal with that.

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Um... okay. This kind of seemed obvious to me, that if you cannot perform some task in a job description for any reason, that you can request but not demand from an employer a job description which excludes that task.

Maybe I'm just too used to thinking in terms of encapsulation, that I lump physical disabilities in with moral injunctions. :)

[cellio]

You would think it would be obvious, but there seem to be an awful lot of Christians in pharmacy and medicine who are now refusing to perform the obligations of their jobs and expect everyone else to go along with it. Now if they declared the issue up front and worked out an arrangement and then their employers reneged (more on that in a moment), that's one thing -- but to commit to the job and then unilaterally change the rules is, well, unprofessional (to say the least).

Ironically, our employer has just announced a policy that, as written, requires me to work on Shabbat. I won't do that, of course, and I am going to push the issue instead of just quietly breaking the rules (and thus giving them an excuse to fire me should they ever feel the need for one). But my grounds aren't "this violates my religion" per se; they are "this violates an agreement already in place". When they bought the previous company they also bought the previous company's obligations, one of which was that there would never be a problem with me arranging my work (and holidays) to accommodate my religious obligations. My point is that it was my responsibility to make sure, before taking the job, that it was compatable with my needs; having done so, I feel justified in insisting. But the pharmacists who didn't take that responsibility up front and are insisting now? Tough noogies.

(You may be wondering what the overlords did, since you wouldn't have been in that part of yesterday's training. It's the new requirement that managers approve subordinate timesheets on Friday rather than on Monday morning, combined with a limit on forecasting hours. So per their policy, I can't leave until all my subordinates do. I am, of course, not the only person with a problem with that; it affects anyone following "summer hours", or who routinely has to leave early to pick up kids from day care, or who just doesn't want to be there at midnight because a subordinate is working late on an important bug. I can just imagine what would happen if someone told the folks in Baghdad "I'm not allowed to solve your problem today because my supervisor has already left -- so sorry, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow when a new time-reporting period begins".)