Do you think that non-believers should benefit from a day off work during religious holidays?

Since most religious holidays have become overly comercialized, they don’t seem so much like religious holidays much any more.
But, more to the point, I wouldn’t mind giving up religious holidays as a non believer but then I would want time off for a few of my own ‘non believer holidays’.

Of course.

If you’re going to give some people the day off, you need to give all people the day off. So, yes. If there is to be a day off for a particular holiday/day associated with a religion, everyone gets it off or no one.

I think we should just get a specified number of floating holidays, in addition to sick/vacation time that a person can use however they want. If they want to celebrate arbor day, then so be it.

I don’t believe in god, but I still have a right to celebrate holidays. I just celebrate for different reasons than religious people. No one “owns” the holiday. Yes it may have originated from specific religious happenings, but today holidays can mean different things to different people.
can you imagine the amount of people who would choose their religion based on the amount of days they could get off of work? Not cool.

Does Christ take Christmas off? Believers should work Extra Hard on religious holidays.

Frankly, there shouldn’t be sanctioned days off for religious holidays. It is an implied form of religious hegemony to force days off for Christmas or Easter, for example. I like the idea of floating days off however. Why should Jews have to take personal days for their religious holidays (like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah) while Christians get to have theirs “fully covered”, so to speak, which allows them to use those extra personal days as they wish.

I’m not sure where you’re coming from with this question, so I’ll try to answer in the least defensive way possible.

Holidays are a product of a concept known as “work-life balance,” which assumes that living and working are two separate things, and that working is somehow instrumental to life, which happens only when you are not at work. I will try to answer the question on the grounds that the distinction between life and work is a flawed and psychologically harmful one.

“Jobs,” in the conventional sense of the word, are abstractions resulting from the abstraction of a “company.” When a group of people want to get something done, they organize their time so as to contribute toward their common goal. Because it is difficult to find people who actually care about the specific thing an empowered and entrepreneurial person might want to do, “companies” are formed to “pay” people to do things they don’t care about, which those people accept because being “paid” empowers them to do what they care about. Companies give people time off in order to placate them, so that they can continue to do good work when they are there. The best way to get someone to quit doing something for you that they never wanted to do in the first place is to stop paying them; the second best way is to make an overt gesture that says “we don’t care about anything that is important to you.” Employee retention is the only reason companies have “holidays,” and if a certain person’s work is valuable enough to let them have the time off, they will give that person the time off. It is perhaps the only civilized part of the structure of the modern “work force.”

In a startup company, when only the founders are working, a group of people work together to make something people want, in order to enrich themselves and their fellow men. They expect to gain wealth in proportion to the wealth they create in others’ lives. In this kind of situation, people work when they can because they want to, and don’t work when they want to spend their time in a slightly different manner. When they are hungry, they eat, when tired, sleep, when bored, they go for a walk. When they’ve finished creating something good for humanity, they celebrate. Holidays are an abstraction of this freedom and control over one’s time, necessary because the only way a large company can measure performance is in time, even though better work can be done in one’s own space, with those who share a common goal and the encouragement of friendship.

For all these reasons, yes, obviously believers require as much time to devote to their own priorities as “non-believers,” since they are both having their time essentially stolen from them.

@aeschylus ; They sell it, it’s not stolen.

@Judi; Point taken.

However, I wonder if people undervalue their time because it has become conventional to “sell” it. And in general I think it is an open question whether someone’s time should be for sale, although I suppose it is certainly someone’s right to sell something so essentially theirs.

The possible parallels with prostitution concern me.

My father, who was a truck driver and union organizer in the 50’s told me that “when you work for someone you sell your time. It no longer belongs to you, so you had better work hard and give your boss their money’s worth. You never want to be accused of stealing.” He also said, that “once you are off the clock your time belongs to you. Your employer can’t dictate what you do when they are not paying you.” It’s not prostitution, it’s earning a living. The ones that are blessed find a way to earn a living in a field they love. My son in laws are correctional officers. I think it would be bad for a correctional officer to “love” their job to much. They do a job that pays well so they will have the money to do the things they want to do when they’re not working.

No. But then, I don’t think believers should either. Why should I have to double my work load because you feel the need to “celebrate” your religion? That’s your personal business. It should have no impact on me or our company.

There shouldn’t be any religious holidays.

@Judi

I understand that dynamic. I also have a job, which I happen to enjoy, although I think I could do it better with my friends in a space we all care about and improve to suit our particular habits.

Your father sounds like an admirable man.

I am simply trying to articulate a confusion I have about where the dynamic of selling time came from, and how it accounts for the obvious fact that everyone selling their time for the same amount should be selling the same amount of it, whether they are a “believer” or not. Why do we have to “earn a living” from someone else? Certainly we don’t need their permission to live. They have money, and we don’t. They have land on which to grow food, and we don’t. They have the time to organize resources to produce things people want, and we don’t, because we are instead spending our time doing something that may or may not be important to us, in order to “earn” our living.

If I put a seed in good soil and water it, it will grow, and I can eat whatever comes out of the ground where I planted that seed. If I write a piece of software that allows me to search the web faster and more easily than anyone else, I have a right to use it and sell it to others who would find it valuable in their lives. Why isn’t this the convention? Why should anyone care what an employer wants when it is the customer that gives the employer the money with which they pay you?

Because not everyone has the money to invest in the infrastructure to get the product to the consumer.

Abso-freakin’-lutely!

Hey, I may not celebrate Easter, but since no one’s giving me Ostara or Beltane as a paid holiday, I enjoy your Easter holiday as my day off to sleep in and toast that I don’t have to go to a church or see my family. Happy non-holiday to me!

@MrItty and @tinyfaery, we NEED days off. As it is, compared to the rest of the modern world, we get very, VERY few days off to rest and let our brains reset. We’d all be healthier and happier if we had a few more excuses for a day off.

So what if it’s based on religion? As long as I’m not forced to worship, I’ll gladly take a mental health day! And my productivity will be all the better for it!

I never said we shouldn’t have holidays, we just shouldn’t have religious holidays.

Hypocrites and carpetbaggers.If the cap fits you wear it.
Would you do an extra day in the name of religion?

When I was teaching college, there was a policy that students could take certain religious holidays off. There was an approved list—Christians could take Good Friday and Ash Wednesday, for instance. Jews could take Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. The number of students who were Jewish for Yom Kippur and Christian for Ash Wednesday was astounding.

That said, I think the fairest solution is to allot everyone a certain number of floating religious holidays. If you’re religious, you take them on the holy days you want off. If you’re not religious, you declare Oatmealmas and Playstationmas and the Holy Feast of Sleeping In, and take them off.

@bananafish – at what point did I say we shouldn’t have days off? I said that if it is a business day, a subset of the population should not get the day off because their particular religion decrees it “important”. Everyone, or no one.

For the most part I don’t think “religious” people do anything special on those days anyway.. so sure.. why not let everyone have a day off.

A day off is a day off. Why are we so high strung about the way we label it? If you were forced to go to church on Easter Sunday because you got Good Friday off that’s one thing. To get up in arms because of what it’s called in quite another.

In a country where there are several religions, what might work would be that employees could take a certain amount of paid time off for religious observances. It should not be too difficult to implement. (Although there was a youth in my department, who, in a single year, took bereavement leave at least 4 times – in the public service, this leave is granted for a close relative.)

I agree with @miasmom. I think it’s an excellent idea that each worker gets a number of days that are neither sick nor vacation days. I think this would make employers happy as well because they wouldn’t have to shut down completely and the people who don’t celebrate those holidays could still patronize the businesses.

On a related note, I think the same should apply to school. Instead of having all of those religious holidays off, kids should be allowed those as excused absences and school should end earlier or certain vacations should be longer.

Only if your going to give all the good little jihadis the day off .