Schindler is a company that makes private elevators and lifts.
The also saved Jews from the Nazis.
Some elevators are set so that on the Jewish Sabbath they stop at every floor without touching the buttons. I was not aware that it was associated with a particular company.
Well, you Otto.
flees
Wait, so it’s okay to use an elevator on the Sabbath but not to press the fucking buttons? What idiot came up with that interpretation of scripture?
In that case, YOU don’t decide what the law is either. So then… what if they decide you are full of shit?
I don’t know of any law that REQUIRES a company to enforce the CEO’s religious views (yet). So what if the CEO changes? And what if the new one has some other cockamamie religious baggage coupled with some “benefit” he personally disapproves of? Is this then the fvcking Religion/Benefits Of The Week Club?
But it’s true.
The idea is that the elevator stops at every floor whether someone is in it or not, your absence has no effect on the elevator’s route and therefore you are not causing work to be done. (There are those who argue that the weight of people in the elevator causes the motor to do more work to account for the extra weight, though.)
Rabbis. I believe it was decided that pushing a button/flipping a switch/etc that turned on something electric was the same as making a fire, forbidden on the Sabbath.
Yeah, that’s the interpretation my conservative Jewish friends use. They leave a TV on, on the channel they want, if there’s something they really really want to watch on Saturday.
It’s fortunate that loopholes have been discovered for tasks like putting one foot in front of another, masticating and swallowing food, and expanding and compressing one’s chest cavity to effect respiration, all of which could easily be considered “work.”
It’s okay for an observant Jew to ride in a box that’s going his way, anyhow. And it’s okay for him to get in one whose doors open and shut,anyhow. Pressing a button to make any of those things happen completes an electrical circuit; this violates the prohibition against starting a fire, because it causes a spark to form, which would not otherwise have been formed.
Personally, I would hesitate to characterize the scholars who came up with such interpretations, workarounds, and other guidelines to allow the faithful to remain observant in the age of post-Bronze-Age technology as “idiotic.”
Where do they stand on programming a DVR to switch channels multiple times per day?
Only by a physiologist/physicist (there surely aren’t any Jewish ones of those, obviously :p).
The Book says (or is interpreted to say) that the Sabbath is for rest, not privation.
Corporations Are Legal Entities, Not “Living, Breathing, Individuals” With Protected Exercise Of Religion.
[C]orporations are “mere creatures of law;” they are not a part of “We the People” by whom and for whom the Constitution was written. The Constitution never mentions corporations, and the Court’s cases recognize a basic, common-sense difference between living, breathing, individuals - who think, possess a conscience, and a claim to human dignity - and artificial entities, which are created by the law for a specific purpose, such as to make running a business more efficient and lucrative.
Even Justice Kennedy, the author of Citizens United, has recognized that corporations may not invoke the Self-Incrimination Clause because the Fifth Amendment right “is an explicit natural right of a person, protecting the realm of human thought and expression.” For some purposes, corporations lack the same rights as individuals.
[…]
*t is nonsensical to treat a business corporation as an actor imbued with the same rights of religious freedom as living persons. No decision of the Supreme Court has ever recognized such an absurd claim. Even Citizens United, which gave extensive protections to corporations under the Free Speech Clause, emphasized that electoral advocacy by corporations was protected, not because business corporations were capable of the human aspects of thought and expression, but to provide a robust debate for individual listeners. - Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at CAC, David Gans
“How can a business have beliefs, religious or otherwise? What does it mean for a business to hold a faith? How, as courts now ponder, could a corporation exercise religion? How does it show sincerity? Can a single-minded obligation to maximize profits meld with religious devotion?”
Abstract:
Corporations — for-profit and non-profit, religiously affiliated and secular — have filed approximately sixty lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employee health insurance plans cover contraception. In this paper, I contend that a dangerous doctrine of “corporate conscience” may be born of the contraception controversy. Already, a number of courts have indicated a willingness to accept that artificial business entities incorporated for secular, profit-making aims have religious beliefs and consciences that excuse them from compliance with law. Their reasoning repudiates longstanding foundations of corporate law. It transforms conscience, which is inherently human, into the province of business entities.
Drawing on health law and policy, I argue that these courts fundamentally misunderstand the nature of health benefits. Health insurance is a form of compensation, earned by and belonging to the employee like wages. By neglecting this economic reality, courts draw incorrect conclusions about the responsibility, legal and moral, of employers for the contents of their employees’ insurance plans, and thus about the burden that any regulation imposes. Moreover, courts fail to recognize that the role the ACA ascribes to private employers bears striking similarity to other comprehensive social insurance schemes, all of which have faced and survived challenges based on free exercise. Any employer responsibility for employer-based insurance should be analyzed under this precedent.
Finally, I suggest that “corporate conscience” would destabilize the rights of employees far beyond the context of contraception. Religiously affiliated commercial actors already assert rights to defy health and safety laws, pay women less, and fire pregnant women. If secular employers succeed in their challenge to the contraception mandate, gender equality and religious freedom will be at risk in all workplaces.
– Elizabeth Sepper, Washington University in Saint Louis - School of Law
Right-wing media have mischaracterized the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provision that requires certain preventive health care services be included in employer-provided health insurance at no cost as a violation of the religious freedoms of corporations who object to contraception. In reality, this mandate, currently before the Supreme Court, accommodates religious employers’ First Amendment rights without allowing secular, for-profit corporations to skirt federal law, and there is no legal precedent that gives corporations the right to exercise religious freedom.
This appears not to be the case. Their donations may be enough to completely obviate their tax burden, but their fundamental charter appears to be for-profit. I think this makes a difference in the larger scheme of things, inasmuch as taking advantage of the market system to make money involves a responsibility to the system. Donating away your tax burden does not relieve you of your responsibility to the system.
As long as you do the programming between sunset on Saturday evening and sunset on Friday evening you’re okay.
I honestly don’t know. I’ll go with Ranger Jeff’s post as my guess.
The ‘leave the TV on’ thing is more for the husband, who wants to watch a basketball game or football game or whatever, where watching it later wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. He’s also just kind of along for the ride - his wife is the more observant.
They sometimes leave a crock pot on with stew in it too. Though that actually makes some sense to me because cooking is genuine work.