God and Business

The current career advice at monster.com includes an article on how to integrate your religion with your job.

My advice would be to leave your beliefs at home if you value your co-workers and clients. They don't care that your Invisible Sky-Daddy commands you to take off early on Fridays, or that He objects to your heretical colleagues eating ham sandwiches. Couldn't you just do your work like everyone else and shut it, please?

I've run into this a few times at two of the nation's top photo-equipment suppliers, Adorama and B&H Photo. They're both excellent, ultra-reputable stores. The thing is, when I want to order something on a Friday afternoon or a Saturday and head over to their sites, I'm told to come back a day or two days later. B&H even disables my shopping cart: apparently, fully automated computer servers, too, are subject to religious commandments. Moreover, I guess God simply won't stand for the disgraceful spectacle of a guy buying a camera bag when he should be at home lighting a menorah, dancing a horah, and reading the Torah. Or whatever.

Long live Amazon and other places that take orders 24/7. I have no idea what Jeff Bezos' religious beliefs are, if any; what I do know is that he respects his customers enough to keep those convictions private, out of the sphere of commerce.

Or maybe Bezos just doesn't like to turn customers away, preferring to make money for himself and his stakeholders, and to further grow the business and create jobs. What a concept.

Anyway, something in that monster.com article caught my eye:

If a company's executives are mostly fundamentalist Christians, you can bet they'll share values such as working hard and spending time with family.

I doubt it, frankly. I'd like to see some hard evidence that fundamentalist Christians devote more time to their families and work harder than Jews, Christians, Muslims, or atheists. The quoted statement doesn't precisely say that people of other persuasions fall short in those regards, but the implication is hard to miss.

Besides, there's a certain tension between those two feats, wouldn't you say? Sure, you can be a hard worker and a devoted family man (or woman) — but chances are, the childless, non-believer careerist two cubicles over will put in way more hours than you do, seeing as he has fewer outside duties and responsibilities.

I might be hairtrigger sensitive here, but honestly, I'm getting pretty goddamn tired of the injection of so-called religious values into everything from career tips to online shopping.

If you want people to respect your beliefs in virgins giving birth and carpenter's sons conjuring loaves and fishes out of thin air, I'm told there's this thing called 'a church' where they'll receive you with open arms. Every other place you go outside of your own home, especially your workplace, people can be forgiven for telling you that they have no interest in hearing about your phantasmagorical inner life, including the part where you have to go home early to satisfy your chosen superstitions.

[image via the Legal Satyricon]

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FRIDAY BONUS: The best song I know that has the words 'God' and 'Business' in the title. I've lamented the prettification of Kurt Weill's formerly jarring, unforgettable compositions after he said auf Wiedersehen to Bertolt Brecht and moved to the United States. Tom Waits might feel the same way. He somehow channels the 1920s Weill, filters him through a couple of layers of blues and booze, and comes up with a winner that radiates raw authenticity.

Comments

[Hermes Ten]

You're not hair-trigger sensitive. Anyone who doesn't believe in fairy tales and has been subjected to these "fundamentalist" types naturally evolves a set of personal defenses. Being around them you know what bunch of liars and hypocrites they are and have a good sense of what they're up to.

Spend a couple of years in a place like Oklahoma and you'll be confronted with enough of these people and their convenient religious beliefs to last a lifetime. Out of mostly working relationships with a good three dozen or so of these types, I've met ONE, I say again, ONE, who wasn't some combination of a liar, hypocrite, thief, or adulterer, and most of them were exceptionally materialistic and advocates of mass murder (from yuking it up laughing about Muslims being killed in natural disasters, to one who told me we should kill every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan).

Funny, but members of this morally smug crowd who consider themselves to be such moral paragons rarely even come up to average standards of decency. Just about every decent person I've met in the last ten years or so as been: 1) a Christian fed-up with Churches and organized religion; 2) a person who believes in God but is skeptical of organized religion and indifferent to the Bible; or 3) a non-believer.

Family values my ass. Most of the ones I've met are just crummy human beings using religion as a smoke screen, since, in this country, merely claiming to be a "Christian" seems to get you the benefit of the doubt, if not extra credit.

[KipEsquire]

Many consumer electronics stores in NYC arose out of the diamond merchant class within the Orthodox Jewish community -- who figured (correctly, I would say) that they could leverage their prior experience transporting and storing valuable inventory, measuring and marketing subtle differences in quality, etc.

Just saying...

[George Arndt]

There are many passages in the Bible which forbid “usury" or taking interest on a loan. So, I guess no Christian can work at a bank.(but many of them do)

Even those who claim to take the Bible literally are actually picking and choosing what parts to believe in and parts not to believe in.

[Phelps]

Don't light the menorah, can't create fires on the shabbot. (That's why they won't let you order something, since that might kick on a circuit that might arc, and that would be a "fire".)

[megs]

I absolutely LOVE Chik-fil-A, a fast food chain owned by a Christian family that does not open on Sundays. It's an inconvenience, but privately owned company. They can do what they want to do.
I DO have a problem with blue laws. Not being able to buy a great (if overpriced) chicken sandwich? No big. Not being able to buy alcohol from anybody, even atheists? Suckage!

I'm a Christian who does not talk religion at all when in a professional environment, even when it comes to explaining I can't do something Sunday morning or have to take off an evening for choir rehearsal. Know why? Because I hate it when other people do it. This is also why I usually appreciate anti-religious snark, though I don't care for atheist moral/intellectual superiority any more than religious. :p

But I still stick to the thought I had when I was a kid and I wondered who worked all those essential jobs on Christmas and came to the conclusion that the reason we have different religions and lack of religions was so people could stagger time off. Which is why government holidays are awful, because they're for everybody.

[tim]

Personally I think you are being a complete ass here.

Is not being able to purchase a piece of equipment on a Friday such a burden to you (and via mail order)? Seriously? B&H has every right to run their private business as they see fit. They are not a government agency. They don't have any sort of monopoly on the market. And you have the right to go to amazon.com to purchase your equipment. Being an atheist living in the midwest I run into all sorts of religious expressions at the work place. Its only when someone starts evangelizing that its an issue. And that has only happened once in my 17 odd years of working. We work and respect each other as individuals even if I don't buy the zombie worship and they think I will burn in hell.

So on fridays - go out, have a beer, eat some food, sleep in saturday and buy your damn equipment on sunday.

[markm]

"can't create fires on the shabbot. (That's why they won't let you order something, since that might kick on a circuit that might arc, and that would be a "fire".)" That's why orthodox jews won't flip a light switch on the sabbath, but computer circuits are solid-state, they don't arc.

And tim: yes, they can shut down their business whenever they want to - and we'll go looking for someone that will sell us the same stuff when we want to buy it.

[Windypundit]

Eh, Adorama doesn't bother me, especially since they just fill my Friday orders on Sunday.

[Hermes Ten]

"Its only when someone starts evangelizing that its an issue. And that has only happened once in my 17 odd years of working."

The opposite of my experience in Oklahoma, where I had religion of the fundamentalist variety rammed down my throat each and every day, and where a week rarely passed without being proselytized. This stood in start contrast to my experience in South Texas where I was surrounded by Catholics and never proselytized.

So, I'm curious. Do your coworkers know you're an atheist?