Dave, this link doesn’t require registration.

Believe what you like, but if your beliefs lead to adverse outcomes for your employer (including colleagues being incompetently trained) then surely those are reasonable grounds on which he can terminate your employment – after following statutory disciplinary procedures at the least.

“Judge Russell said that a later hearing would have to establish whether the claimant was “dismissed for the possession of religious or philosophical beliefs or for his alleged inappropriate foisting of his beliefs on others.” – the Independent

As a general set of rules:

(1) If you join an organisation willingly but your beliefs conflict with that of the organization then you don’t have a leg to stand on.

(2) If you join an organisation willingly but it changes the rules (as happened a while back when a club changed the uniform to something altogether more revealing) it’s the organisation at fault.

(3) If you join an organisation willingly but then change your own beliefs so that they conduct with the organisation then that’s down to you.

That said, who doesn’t find themselves in conflict with their employer? You can campaign to change the organisation through your union or deliberately subvert your duties.

There’s no logical reason a secular belief shouldn’t be afforded the respect that a superstitious one is; on the contrary I have more respect for a someone who argues a moral case without recourse to the occult.

Dave, a couple of comments:

(1) The recent ruling in the environmentalist case did not say that Marxism and other political philosophies count as ‘religion’; it said they can count as ‘philosophical belief’ with the same legal protection as religious belief; so you misstate things slightly when you talk of Trotskyism being ruled to be a religion for legal purposes.

(2) The same ruling – the recent environmentalist one – draws on ECHR law (I think?) to limit the category of protected ‘philosophical belief’ to beliefs that are – and I summarise very crudely – consistent with democracy and human rights. This qualification almost certainly rules out protection for fascists and, therefore, the BNP. (It might be an interesting day in court as and when a judge is required to rule on whether it also rules out Trotskyists….)

Perhaps this could be a way round the anti-trade union laws? (Trotskyite beliefs make wildcat strikes a point of principle?)

‘Perhaps this could be a way round the anti-trade union laws? (Trotskyite beliefs make wildcat strikes a point of principle?)’

The more you support this law to protect secular beliefs the more entrenched protection for religious beliefs will become.

#6

I wasn’t being entirely serious.

Generally I think freedom of conscience & belief are important freedoms, and should be accommodated within the workplace as far as reasonably possible regardless of whether the beliefs are considered part of a religion or not. Where particular beliefs are widespread though, it makes sense for large employers to take notice of the needs of workers who observe those beliefs even if they don’t currently employ people who do, so as not to discriminate against potential future employees.

Note though that all that is considered within a framework of supporting improvements in workers’ conditions rather than a framework of offering special privileges to religions.

I actually have a great deal of sympathy for this guy – I just think this was the wrong legislation.

“Flabbergastingly risible though I find the notion that the Old Bill should hire mediums to contact murder victims on the other side of the grave and find out who bumped them off . . ”

Desperate situations call for desperate remedies:

“34 per cent of homicide prosecutions in London involving murder and manslaughter failed”
http://www.yrtk.org/2005/cps_main/

“On an average day in Britain, two or three people will be murdered. The UK currently has a homicide rate equivalent to the mid-Victorian period.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/12/teen_homicide.html

> Desperate situations call for desperate remedies:

well, only so far.

Is it too much to ask for evidence-based approach to policing – without evidence that clairvoyants work, why use them?

[deleted]

@10: “Is it too much to ask for evidence-based approach to policing – without evidence that clairvoyants work, why use them?”

Previously, police in many places had tried profiling but that doesn’t work too well and then the Metropolitan Police tried the entrapment, as with Colin Stagg in Rachel Nickell murder and that spectacularly failed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Nickell_murder_case

Of course, shooting suspects is another option but the public gets upset:

“Officer cleared after killing a man carrying a table leg”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/13/ukguns.hughmuir

An apparently infallible way of boosting Police productivity until caught out:

” A third of the violent offences which were not recorded as crimes should have been. An inspection of how police forces record violence showed that officers are deciding that thousands of violent incidents are not crimes.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6885415.ece

It’s completely hilarious that anyone in the twenty-first century should consider
a person who talks to invisible dead people as worthy of anything other than a short spell of psychiatric intervention.

Bob B, are things as they appear? Is your argument really something along the lines of:

a. A lot of serious crimes do not result in conviction

b. Some methods which have been used by the Police (eg psychological profiling) are a bit shit

c. Armed Police Officers sometimes make mistakes and shoot people when they really shouldn’t

d. Some Police Forces fix their performance data

AND THEREFORE

e. Mystic Meg should be made Head of Forensic Services for the Met, which is to say a procedure for which there is absolutely no theoritical scientific basis and which has been shown in numerous trials to perform as well as pure chance should be used by the Police to attempt to solve crimes?

Now, for 10 points, can anyone spot the tiny flaws in Bob B’s “logic”

For 1,000 bonus points, can anyone come up with an argument to show that Bob B’s argument contains even the faintest trace of logic?

For 10,000 points can any medical professional visiting this forum give us a diagnosis for Bob B?

“It’s completely hilarious that anyone in the twenty-first century should consider
a person who talks to invisible dead people as worthy of anything other than a short spell of psychiatric intervention.”

At least it’s relatively harmless regarding the likely consequences compared with the other methods I mentioned above.

Of course, there is the risk that the spirit world might convey a message that person X – or Gordon Brown, since he’s usually blamed for most things these days – is responsible. Without new legislation mandating the acceptance of messages from the spirit world as legitimate trial evidence – I hope Jack Straw isn’t reading this – the courts would strike out the testimony. But then as Tony Blair used to often say: You can’t stop modernisation