Hi,
concerning the Muslim handshake case, I have a theory. I live in Finland, and the unemployment laws are quite similar to the Swedish ones. It works so that when you become unemployed, you need to communicate the fact to the unemployment office. They will collect information about you, and your desired field of employment. From then on, they will set up interviews for you.

The thing is, you can’t refuse a job if it’s offered to you, or your unemployment benefits will be cut. It makes sense, because these benefits are quite enough to lead an acceptable life (i.e. rent, bills, food, and so on), and the government want to discourage people from just sitting their asses home enjoying the free money.

What you can do, though, is put the potential employer in the condition of NOT wanting to offer you a job. If you’re really lousy at the interview, and the potential employer doesn’t offer you a job, then you’ll keep getting the unemployment money.

It’s just a theory, but it might be that this man was purposely trying NOT to get the jobs, by means of being rude, not shaking hands, and perhaps more. Maybe the unemployment office realized that and got fed up with him, deciding to cut the benefits.

The only hole in my theory, though, is: why would he win the trial? Sweden is quite a secular country, so I doubt he won on the basis of religious discrimination alone. Perhaps there’s more, perhaps there’s a hole in the law, I don’t know.

Anyway, just a hunch. Thanks for the show!

Hm. That’s a better theory than any I’ve heard so far. The original article was quite sparse on detail unfortunately.

I was wondering if there was a link on the vatification of Salt Lake City. I’m rather interested, and wanted to do a little research on that.

What fascinated me was the quote from the presiding bishop you read regarding the “low income people bringing in crime.” It seems there’s a rank hypocrisy there from the LDS church, which claims to be Christian and - until I officially left the church 1 year ago - claimed that people should be helping the poor/sick/needy. Now they want to say “Well, but we don’t want to actually have them near our church stuff - they’ll break it.”

Of course, they’re also the few churches that turned down my interview request to ask what they’re beliefs are, so maybe there’s some disconnect I’ve missed.

Anyway, I’ll check on my own elsewhere, but if you have the link, I’d appreciate it.

Here’s the link to the Salt Lake City article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/us/08saltlake.html

Here are the links to the other articles we discussed:

Christian founders, Texas textbooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html

Handshake case:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2010/02/08/muslim_man_wins_handshake_case_in_sweden/

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