Not central to your point, but: many of us Pagans are religious folks. Actually, we are religious in that we are Pagan.
:o
I used the wrong word there. Heck, I used to be Wiccan. Rather devoutly so.
In my defense, I don’t just mean Christian as far as being religious in that statement. I mean that Pagans generally get a pass when it comes to religion in my current industry. By default a person is expected to be some flavor of agnostic or Pagan unless they are culturally Jewish. By default, a person is expected to be actively against any organized religion. I could just about be UU without anyone lofting a brow at me.
I don’t think this is a good idea. SecondJudith should not have to justify her religious beliefs to her boss. If she re-opened the discussion I think it’s likely that her boss would respond in an argumentative and condescending way, and by bringing up the subject herself SecondJudith would be weakening her claim of a hostile work environment.
BTW, it’s my impression that SecondJudith does not participate in her religion simply to keep her mother/husband/whoever happy. It might be a betrayal of her beliefs to claim this, even if it were just to keep her boss off her back.
No, it’s just that I don’t care what gentiles believe in. They can worship God or Allah, or they can be atheists, or they can go back to worshiping Wotan for all I care. What they can’t do is pick on Jews for being Jews. This is ironclad policy.
Maybe the boss in question doesn’t see that what he’s doing is antisemitism. I’m sure lots of men who sleep with women against their will don’t think that what they’re doing is rape. Doesn’t change the fact that it is.
One way to ‘deal’ with this is to accept that your ‘practice’ (as you call it) seems ridiculous to some people and they have every right to express this opinion.
We’ve been over this so many times, but the point never seems to stick. People have the right to believe whatever they want. People also have the right to express an opinion about a belief. If I feel a given belief or practice is admirable or theologically impressive, I’m entitled to say so. Likewise, if I feel a given belief or practice is absurd or ridiculous, I’m entitled to say so. It might not be very tactful or polite or conducive to good working relationships, but I’m entitled to say so nonetheless.
Consider this example. If you want to believe in pink unicorns and to participate in rituals somehow associated with honouring pink unicorns, I can fully respect your right to believe what you believe and participate in any rituals you want. But I don’t have to respect the beliefs themselves, and if I want to express my view that pink unicorns seem rather nonsensical to me, I have that right.
What alternative would you propose? That I can’t assert that believing in pink unicorns is absurd? Of course I can. Just as I can say that in my opinion, this or that religious belief or practice seems brilliant, smart, helpful, strange, absurd, ridiculous, profound, delightful, relevant, theologically dubious, unwise, unnecessary or any other opinion.
Another way of dealing with all of this is to keep your religion and religious practices private. Just keep them to yourself and don’t refer to them in the workplace. But if you do mention them, you have to accept that others may pass comment on them.
Learn some tolerance. Specifically, tolerance of the fact that other people may express the opinion that your religious practices are absurd.
We’ve been over this many times, and by the same token she has every right to say that having her religion made fun of bothers her, and conduct herself according to whether her boss respects her enough not to hassle her in that way, or not.
Update: today I received an Amazon book order at work (most of order packages to the office, as sometimes they need to be signed for), a history of the Biblical character Judith* in Western popular culture.
MY BOSS: Ooh, what have you got there?
ME: It’s a book on Judith*.
MY BOSS: Oh. [returns to work.]
What I think happened is that she started a friendly conversation (“Whatcha readin’?”) and then stopped as soon as she realised it involved religion. Which is a really good thing, I think, because it shows she is aware of the boundaries I tried to set earlier, even if she did blow past them once after I sent her that “please knock it off in the workplace” email.
I have been trying to figure out how I could have avoided mentioning the subject of the book at all, though. It’s difficult, because we do like chatting about art and culture in the office, and I think “ooh, what book have you ordered?” is a perfectly fair question, and if it had been a novel or cookbook or something, one I would have been happy to start chatting about. However, I’m not sure what to say when the answer is “that thing we agreed not to talk about in the workplace”.
But that’s completely untrue. I have no idea what you mean by “ceremonial Jew”, but I’m fairly certain I’m not one. I’m single and live alone. I’m not doing it to keep anyone happy (my parents are High Holy Days-only-type shulgoers). I think the problem has mostly gone away, although I am still intending to email HR this week or next to inquire about our hostile-workplace policy, but it would upset me even more to have to lie about my practice and identity.
Are you in the US? This isn’t legally true in the UK; employees are protected from harassment on religious grounds in the workplace. I don’t know what the laws are where you are, though.
*which, I feel I should note, is not the name most people know me by
I think you have to accept that when you are recieving an item referring to religion in a workplace, it’s going to be slightly awkward.
I wonder whether you would be better off getting such materials delivered to your husband’s workplace or a friend’s workplace, in order to avoid further awkwardness in your workplace? That’s what I’d do, if it wasn’t something I wanted to share or talk about with workmates. To me, religion is personal, and personal items should not be delivered to a workplace.
You brought up the topic of religion first.
Who paid for the lunch? Was the lunch on company time? If the company paid then you may have a point. If not, then you weren’t on company time and she could say anything she wanted, couldn’t she? And remember you brought religion up this time, too.
You updated a social networking site and another person you have given access to that site made a comment on it. You say you were on your own time when you did so. So, was your boss on company time when she made her comments? If she made a comment on your post would she have been out of line, too? If your boss had asked politely what a Simchat Torah is would this have been an issue? No, because you started to explain what it was. You don’t seem to want to follow your own wishes when it comes to mixing religion and the workplace.
No, what upset you was when she said, “Are you joking?” Do you expect people to not act surprised when you tell them crazy stuff like dancing around with books? I’d of thought you were trying to pull my leg, too.
What upsets you is not talking about religion, but someone making critical comments about it. Essentially you want to explain your batshit craziness and not have anyone call you on it.
And frankly, it seems that your workplace is also your home space. You update facebook which all your coworkers and boss have access to, you get packages delivered, and you hang out during your own time together. You can’t expect people to do that and not act less formally than they would in a normal work environment.
I happen to be in the UK, but this has no bearing on any of the points I made. I have made no reference to harassment or to relevant legislation pertaining to, for example, discrimination on religious grounds.
The fact that you choose to feel offended by something someone says at work does not de facto make it ‘harassment’. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Depending on the circumstances, it might just be a case of you choosing to play the victim, or being hyper sensitive. Or it might be a case of truly appalling harassment warranting official action by whoever is in charge. It’s all in the details.
Time to shoot some more ifish in a barrel.
Point 1. She can take responsibility for her own actions and decisions. If she chooses to keep her religion private, which might be a good idea, no-one will know what she believes so she will never have to deal with any comments about her beliefs. If she takes the decision to refer to her own beliefs in public, she’s entitled to do this but actions have consequences. Maybe from time to time other people will express opinions. These opinions may range all the way from ‘Wow! I think that’s a wonderful belief and very sage advice’ to ‘I think it’s bronze age science fiction and an insult to human intelligence’.
Point 2. When you say ‘make fun of’, this implies that other people are ridiculing things that are not intrinsically or inherently ridiculous. But you and I might have different opinions about that. If I’m talking to someone who thinks they want to spend part of their weeking building a shrine to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I might say ‘I think that’s an absurd thing to do’. This isn’t me ‘making fun of’ something. It’s me offering an intelligent opinion about something, and moreover about something that I’m entitled to regard as ‘ridiculous’ given the general standards prevailing in my society and my culture.
The short form of this is to suggest that if it bothers you when people point out that what you believe is absurd, then a good starting point would be not to believe in absurd things. If you come into the office one day wearing a rubber chicken strapped to your head, people are going to make fun of you because it’s a ridiculous thing to do. If you don’t want them to laugh at you, don’t come in with a rubber chicken strapped to your head.
Here’s a rather telling point. I’ve worked in many offices and come into contact with thousands of different people from all walks of life. I have never felt the need to complain about feeling ‘offended’ or ‘harassed’ concerning anyone’s comments about anything I think, feel or believe. One reason is that I don’t make absurd, fanciful or ridiculous utterances on a par with bronze age science-fiction. Were I to start doing so, I would consider it entirely fair for people to point out that I’m talking rubbish.
You’ll note that what I had to say bore no reference to any external standard as to whether what she believes actually is ridiculous. As you point out, that’s a matter of opinion. My point stands: as her boss is (legally - at least depending on jurisdiction) free to mock her religion, she is equally free to find that this speaks poorly of the respect her boss bears for her, and conduct herself accordingly. (We do not ordinarily mock those whom we respect.)
There are apparently a lot of people here who aren’t required to attend annual refresher courses on harassment prevention.
There’s no debate here. Who paid for lunch doesn’t matter. The strength of SecondJudith’s Jewish-ness doesn’t matter. Shoe-on-the-other-foot doesn’t matter. The “reasonableness” of the boss’s position doesn’t matter. Under US law, an employee is entitled to a workplace environment free from harassment on the basis of sex, race, religion, ethnicity (and a few more categories). Period. The boss’s repeated comments denigrating SJ’s religion/ethnicity constitute harassment. Free speech does not cover this; a person has no right to freely express sentiments in the work environment that a reasonable person would constitute as hostile to another worker.
If SJ chooses to take this to HR, either the boss will stop or SJ stands to gain a boatload of money in court.
Two of the mentioned incidents a reasonable person could construe as not being in a ‘work environment’.
That doesn’t matter. As we learned in harrassment training, off color remarks in a social setting among co-workers can also land you in trouble.
Basically, when with work colleagues, whether it’s in a conference room or a theme park, act professionally.
This is the most important point at hand, of course. I was just providing the rejoinder specifically to the eternal “but I have the right to find this ridiculous” stuff.
You mean like if you know your boss is a dedicated atheist you shouldn’t bring up your religion because it upsets her? Or are only those who have a ‘religion’ capable of being harassed?
How is it harassing an atheist to say “I’d like this day off for Yom Kippur”? How is it harassing an atheist by giving a brief, honest answer when that atheist asks a question about your religion? How is it harassing an atheist to say you’re excited to go to an event at your place of worship?
Publicly mocking a person, regardless of the reason for doing so, is a jerk move. You might think you’re correct and you might be right, but it’s still a jerk move.
You seem to be assuming that in this case the boss’s comments involve ‘denigrating’ someone’s beliefs. I am not at all sure this has been established. We would need to know many more details to reach a fair verdict. For one thing, and I say this with plenty of kindness and respect towards SecondJudith, we’d need to hear the other side of the story. At the moment, we only have one account. Someone else’s account might differ.
On a broader point, it still seems to me that expressing my personal opinion that a given belief is ridiculous is not de facto a case of ‘denigrating’ anything or ‘harassment’. It may be, but then again it may not be. If the stated belief is, in fact, ridiculous (e.g. ‘I think this office would run much better if everyone hopped around on one leg’) then it’s okay for me to describe it as such.
If you don’t like that example because it’s not ‘religious’, then let me offer an example that is, although I will intentionally choose an example not directly related to the OP. Suppose a worker is responsible for fire safety procedures. Suppose this same person asserts that there is no need to do anything (such as marking exits cleary, putting up maps showing assembly points, getting the extinguishers checked annually etc.) because he prays to Vishnu every day and asks for everyone in the office to be kept safe from fire. In this case, not only would I be well within my rights to comment that this belief is ridiculous, but I would also be bound by law to intervene and make sure this was not the full extent of our fire prevention measures.
Your post also seems to suggest that for one person to comment that they disagree with another person’s assertions and beliefs constitutes ‘hostility’. It does not. It constitutes disagreement. It doesn’t have to be done in a hostile way. It is possible to disagree in a way that is kind, courteous and tactful. This is another reason why I’d like to hear more than just SecondJudith’s account of what has been going on before reaching a judgment.
By the way, simply inserting the word ‘period’ at the end of a sentence doesn’t confer righteousness.
I’m not telling anyone else in my office about the SDMB or this thread so they can verify facts. Sorry, ianzin, you’re just going to have to take my word that the events I described happened the way I described them. Anyway, I appreciate the thought, but I’m more interested in advice than ‘a fair verdict’.
I think ianzin makes a valid point, that remarks critical of religion do not necessarily establish actionable harassment. Not sure exactly what would be required to constitute a hostile work environment, disparate impact, etc.
No question but that the boss sounds like a jerk, and that statements such as hers would unlikely ever be wise management behavior. But as a nonbeliever, it does bother me that so many believers seem to feel they are far more entitled to express their opinions than I. Especially when their opinions are generally based on delusion and/or make believe.
How different would this situation be if Judith and her boss were of different political persuasions and the boss was disrespectful of the opposing view? Or if Judith believed in literal biblical inerrancy and a young earth, and the boss correctly observed on the ridiculousness of those beliefs?
I am a big fan of the freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights. But I’m not sure why so many people act as tho religion entitles them to a “free pass” in the court of common opinion. I cannot prevent you from exercising your religion, and I cannot engage in certain hate crimes, but I sure should be able to express my views to the contrary.
I’m glad the boss seems to have realized that her comments are neither welcome nor appropriate. You should not need to worry about “hiding” your beliefs - or your books. And the interaction concerning the book seems entirely appropriate. Her disbelief is exactly as valid as your belief (tho I admit I do not fully understand atheistic Judaism.) And the workplace would probably be much better off if you both spoke about the weather instead. 