sciguy wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:I would argue yes, because of the potential for sabotage of the church's message, either deliberate or accidental.
I intended it to be a premise of my scenario that the atheist will actually do as good a job as the christian he is competing against.
It's a shaky premise, in practice. You're assuming that which the job applicant would normally wish to prove, and would have a sharply uphill battle to prove.
Unless the job applicant could satisfy the church that they have that qualification- that they
really can represent the beliefs of the institution- the church has no reason to hire them. And I'd be very dubious of an avowed atheist (or adherent to Religion X) who claims to be able to do that for the church of Religion Y.
Two issues here.
First, given that plenty of "actual believers" embezzle money from their church, molest alter boys, and commit all sorts of other interesting misdeeds, clearly there are SOME atheists who would probably be better at the job than SOME actual believers (assuming the atheists in question manage to not commit any serious felonies while on the job). Yes, taken as statistical groups, the average true believer might be better than the average atheist. But since when is it okay to discriminate against individuals because of stereotypes about their group?
Imagine a job requires running. A man with one leg comes up and wants to join.
Now,
maybe he can run with one leg and a pegleg or something, and move very fast and thus be a good runner. But he's going to have an uphill battle to convince anyone of that, which is not entirely unfair under the circumstances.
The same problem is faced when you have a job that requires piety, and an atheist comes up and applies. In this case, piety is
a job qualification, one which you would (rightly) be very cautious about assuming that an atheist could display. I mean, what proportion of atheists would actually want to be preachers, as opposed to those who want to do it so they can undermine the goals of the church, or simply get free money for lecturing people they despise?
Second, if you want to dismiss my scenario as irrelevant because it's unrealistic, fine.
It's not irrelevant- I can
imagine an atheist who is qualified to fill certain religious posts. But it's hard to do; the subset of all possible minds that could do it is very small. So in practice, an atheist who is willing and able to accurately reflect the views and interests of the religion they want to be hired by is a rare animal- any atheist showing up with a job application should have to convince others of their bona fides before being accepted as such an animal.
But as I said before, justifying the discrimination away as a practical matter related to job performance dodges what seems to me to be the more interesting underlying moral issue. If christians aren't hiring atheists to work in their churches because the atheists are bad at the job, then it's not really even discrimination in the way that people normally mean it. Or if it is, it's the same sort of "discrimination" that prevents me from playing in the NBA or being a brain surgeon; a simple lack of qualification, which is boring. As I said before, almost anyone would agree that people shouldn't be hired for jobs that they will necessarily be bad at.
To me, however, the more interesting question is whether or not christians should be able to discriminate simply because of the applicant's religion per se. Also, I would submit to you that in the vast majority of cases, the christians probably aren't really discriminating against applicants of the wrong religion/lifestyle/whatever because they fear the "deviant" will do a bad job - they are probably discriminating against such applicants because they simply don't like people of other religions/lifestyles. Any hand-waving that they do about not being able to perform on the job is probably just their rationalization, rather than the actual basis for their decision (even if the rationalization happens to be correct).[/quote]
