May Green Be With You!
Only posting a link!
Belief in Climate Change given the same legal status as Religious Faith in GB.
Mr Nicholson, 42, from Oxford, told a previous hearing that his views were so strong that he refused to travel by air …
The grounds for Mr Nicholson’s case stem from changes to employment law made by Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, in the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003.
The regulations effectively broaden the protection to cover not just religious beliefs or those "similar" to religious beliefs, but philosophical beliefs as well.
My comment: so if my strongly-held belief in the Phlogiston theory, or the geocentric model, makes it so I will not travel by air when and where my boss tells me (after all, jet engines may be combining oxygen and phlogiston to produce dangerous calx, causing a drop in the quintessential elements superlunar planets in the aether need to turn on their epicycles), I am to be immune from being discharged?
What if I believe the Lamarckian model of evolution, and so I require my boss to put things on low shelves, because I do not want to stretch high and make my children have long giraffe-like necks?
The ramifications in law are endless.
No science fiction story, not even Robert Heinlein’s ‘Future History’ with its mention of the Crazy Years, could have predicted the Alice Through the Looking-Glass lunacy which characterizes the modern age. Perhaps Jack Vance captured some of the flavor of self-righteousness, eccentricity, and artificiality of modernity in some of the quaint and pompous rogues, villains, and unsmiling petty officials in his imaginative worlds, which we now see taken with perfect seriousness around us.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
