Religious institutions and religious employers should be allowed to hire based on their views

Priests, Ministers etc. Pro has said “the government cannot qualify what ‘having a relationship with God’ consists of, and therefore could not allow that to be the sole reason for why someone is not qualified for a job” This is a completely flawed statement. Do you think the government decides what counts as qualified or not? The guvernment states that you can not-hire based on a lack of qualifications for the job role, the guvernment does not say what qualifies people for each job role. Let’s look at this from another job point. The government cannot qualify what ‘artistic vision’ consists of, anymore than ‘having a relationship with god’. But people could be not taken on for not having artistic vision, as that may very well be a qualification for getting an artist job. The same could be said for ‘creative flair’, ‘having an eye for it’, ‘natural talent’, and all similar things. The same can be said when it comes to music too, any many other jobs. If an artist does not have those, and the employer is requiring someone with those skills to qualify them for the job, then that artist would not meet the requirements for that job, no matter how much they had studied art. To take it back to religion, in just the same way, if it is a requirement of the religion for the person to have a ‘relationship with god’ which is a term well used within certain religions, then being an atheist or of another religion would show that the person in question does not have that particular relationship with God. Also, many religions (Christianity for example) say specifically not to follow other gods. In the bible it says to stone people of other religions to death, so surely at very least, having them working for the religion as a leading figure would cause issues and have a negative effect on the religion and it’s mission. Handymen and Rights Pro says “The government cannot tell a religious institution to act differently than they believe. ” And “This is setting one religion lower than another and infringes on the first amendment. ” Of course they can! A religion is not above the law. They are people just like everyone else. If the religion is doing something which causes harm (for example discriminating against people) then laws can be brought in and enforced to stop that harm. If what you have said was true, a religion could believe its ok to kill someone and the government could not tell them to not kill that person. This is insane, and severely wrong. It is not infringing on any rights. It would only be putting one religion above the others if they were saying this to one religion. These laws would / are (depending on where you stay) enforced across the board. Every religion has to abide by the same laws. To assume it is, would be to assume that there are separate rules for one specific group. While this is true in the bible, this is not the way laws work today. Pro has also put forward “Additionally, many religions only want members of their faith in certain areas of their buildings. ” This falls in line with what I said. The persons religion is not why they would not be hired. If the church has rules that only Christian people can go into room 243, and a proposed handyman is Muslim and cant go fix something in room 243, the restriction of access would impede the handyman’s ability to do his job to the same standard as a Christian handyman. The hiring judgement would be based on how the religion affected the person’s ability to do the job, not just “don’t hire him, he’s one of ‘those’ guys. The outcome is the same, but the journey to get there is different. This is important because if there was no difference in how they could do their job, there is no reasons to discriminate against one religion for another. Religious Employers Pro has said in the title "religious employers should be allowed to hire based on their views". He has now backed up on this to say “religions COMPANIES should be allowed to hire based on how other religions will affect their public image”. These are two separate claims, and I will talk about both. First off, the first one is still wrong and no points have been made otherwise. If I open a newsagents, there is no reason for me to say “I’m an atheist therefore I do not want to hire religious people” or vice versa. My point stands that Pro’s claim of “religious employers should be allowed to hire based on their views” is wrong. Pro needs to address this and back up this claim. As for what it has been changed to, Pro is no longer talking about hiring based on belief and has moved on to how this belief effects the public image of the company. Unfortunitly we cannot hire based on public image. If this were true, we could justify not hiring any person based on weight, skin colour, gender, or anything at all to be honest, as it may “effect the public image of the company”. There is no reason that myself, as an atheist, would do any better or worse of a job than any Christian when a Christian book store is hiring. The only time it should be used would be if the 2 candidates are absolutely matched, and you could say that the person religion may give them better insight into the books available when customers come in, but again you would need to back this up. You can’t just categorically say “group x should be aloud to not hire group b, because they are a bunch of jews”. I look forward to Pro's reply and the following round.