Comment 8 by Red Dog :

You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to understand that someone doesn't want to mess up their work environment by introducing an un-necessary conflict. And when confronted with a surprising and uncomfortable situation, staying silent and thinking through what if anything to say is a very rational response.

Yes, exactly.

I think we all know how annoying open displays of religiosity like that can be, especially in the workplace. But before you respond LIEBORE, you need to think carefully about the wider implications of your actions. I think it was PZ Myers who said: “never underestimate how sensitive religious people can be”?

To illustrate this, here is a little “religion in the workplace” story of my own. I work for a UK company that does a lot of business in South Africa (which is a much more religious country than the UK). Many of the emails I see coming from South Africa have footers containing religious messages; things like “Trust in the Lord and You Shall Want for Nothing”, and other such nonsense. One day, I was dealing with an email which ended with the following:

Seven days without prayer makes one weak.

I was completely fed up with seeing perfectly good bandwidth wasted like this, so before I sent the email on, I decided to “improve it”, and so I changed the footer to:

Seven days with prayer makes one weak-minded.

I thought (silly me) that this was just a bit of harmless fun, but you can guess what happened next. The original sender found out somehow, and he complained about how his email had been “vandalised” and how he had “felt personally violated by this” (I know, groan).

I ended up being told off, and forbidden from doing anything like that again, which could have been much worse I suppose. You LIEBORE, of course, risk far more than that where you live. Rising to religious stupidity might make you feel better at the time, but it can come back to haunt you, so I hope that you will be very careful.