I'm more curious about the following hypothetical candidate/interview:
In casual conversation the candidate reveals he's a member of an online forum, the subject matter of which regularly revolves around elaborate torture scenarios, freezing the heads of the recently deceased, making decisions on behalf of our counterparts in parallel worlds and the pressing concern that thinking machines may either harvest our atoms for their strange alien purposes or trap us in a virtual Hell for the rest of eternity. He also emphasises the point of this forum is about having as accurate an understanding of reality as possible.
I think anti-discrimination law has a different idea of what constitutes "religion" than we do.
If you use loaded terms and concentrate weirdness without explaining any of it, you're going to get something that looks bad. But doing that is dishonest. Why would the same person both mention that they're a member of a community and lie in a way that makes it look bad?
Let's say you are interviewing a candidate for a job. In casual conversation, the candidate mentions that he is a member of a rather old and prestigious country club. You've never heard the name of the club before.
You look up the country club afterwards, and are surprised by what you read. The club refuses membership to homosexuals. It revokes the membership of couples who use birth control. Leadership positions are reserved to unmarried males.
The candidate is otherwise competent. Under what conditions would you hire him? Would you want a law passed banning hiring discrimination based on country club membership?
(The country club is analogous to a nicer version of the Catholic church. I left out a couple bad things.)
Religious discrimination is illegal in many parts of the world, and I think that's probably a good thing. Still, keeping this at the object level (no meta-rules or veils of ignorance) it seems to me that discriminating against religious people is fine. I'm curious what other people think.