What do you mean that it's a personal belief?

You could say that it's a "personal belief" that the sky is blue or that the Earth is (roughly) spherical.  It's also a "personal belief" that meth isn't particularly healthy, and that lighting the office on fire isn't a good way to warm it up in the winter.

Should we just never correct anybody, ever, no matter what strange contortions of fact they may subscribe to? 

No no, we should never tell Luke that setting the rec room on fire is dangerous- it's his personal belief that rec room bonfires are the best way to dissolve his meth, which is something he personally believes is necessary to prevent him from sliding off the edge of this flat earth into the yellow skies underground.

Facts are facts- some people have them dangerously wrong, and those mistaken beliefs can adversely affect the people around them.

If we were to tip toe around everybody's person beliefs, we could never teach each other anything, and before too terribly long we'd be back in the dark ages because the signal to noise ratio would destroy any hope of scientific progress, or even holding on to what we have.

The complication that comes in is that religion DOES enjoy special status and sex does not. So while a court would have a fairly easy time ruling in your favor if the sign could be shown to be sexual harassment a sign that basically announces the owners religion does not have the same effect. Especially in a place like Tennessee where the owner could make a case that professing his/her religion is actually good for the business. 

You are correct that if an employer were to repeatedly ask an employee to engage in a prayer or to go to church after an employee made it clear they didn't want to participate a lawsuit could be pressed. Which is why I specified independent of other actions by management. A sign, cross, nativity scene etc. would most likely be found to be free exercise of religion by the Supreme Court. No case about signs has made it to SCOTUS yet and I am not aware of any in the pipeline on this issue but I fail to see how a sign that professes your religion can be interpreted as anything other than free exercise. I haven't even been able to find a case that was brought up on similar grounds. The sign said "He died for you" not "non-Christians suck" or "believe in my God or else" or anything else coercive. It is simply stating the religious opinion of the owner on property that he/she owns. The First Amendment makes no distinction between freely exercising your religion in your home or at the business you own. 

As for suing them for not being hired all they would have to show is that they have no clue what religion their other employees were, that there is some diversity and there is some legitimate business reason not to hire you. Remember, in your scenario YOU were the one making a big deal of your religion or lack thereof. The employer didn't ask or comment on it. Now if the employer was so stupid as to get in a theistic argument with you and then not hire you now you might have a case. Still BS in my opinion but legal. 

I have done a little research and could find no cases of anyone suing over a company printing a bible verse anywhere successfully. At least I couldn't find one in Google or the EEOC website. I would be interested in finding a similar case but it really isn't important enough for me to spend my free hours doing so. Wish I still had access to Lexis Nexis then I could give you a definitive answer. Oh well. If you are ambitious enough to ever try such a lawsuit (or actually convince someone to try it) let me know how it works out. I would bet against you if the company actually decided to fight it.

 All right, I surrendered to my curiosity and looked up a few cases. The relevant cases are

 Brown Transp. Corp. v. Commonwealth, 578 A.2d 555, 562 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 1990) and

EEOC v. Townley 859 F.2d 610 (9th Circuit, 1988)

In Brown a worker was fired after he complained about bible verses being printed on his paycheck. It is a rather contentious case and you can find a myriad of arguments on both sides of it. So if you were to press a lawsuit like we are discussing Brown would probably be your main precedent. There simply does not seem to be other similar cases. This may be because most people don't see it as something worth suing over, companies immediately remove signs after a complaint or the cases are summarily dismissed by judges and thus don't attract any attention on the internet. 

The one point in Brown that would weaken your case is that the court found that the worker had been discriminated against because the employee could clearly show that after the complaint was formally made his formal employee reviews went from consistently high marks to consistently low marks. A compelling argument can be made that the only reason the court ruled in favor of the employee was because he was fired and not because of the bible verses alone.

In Townley, an atheist was suing over being forced to attend religious services. The court ruled that Townley could not force its employees to attend religious services. The relevant part to this case is that the company printed bible verses everywhere which was ignored by both the EEOC and the court. It was ruled that Townley could continue to have its religious services but could no longer make it a mandatory condition of employment. 

Also, if you look at the EEOC hand book it clearly states

and 

http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/religion.html#_Toc203359506

So focusing on Brown you might have a chance, but given the EEOC policy, Townley and the First Amendment I think you would have a really hard time unless you could prove that the sign could be interpreted by a reasonable person to disparage or attack your religious beliefs. Most successful religious harassment cases I found involved repeated religious slurs and obviously derogatory comments. I don't think the sign rises to that and I would be stunned if a court found it did. And if it did, do you really want to go down that road? Personally, I would rather put up with an offensive sign and have the right to say "there is no god" or have a sign that says so if I want. We are the minority and have far more to lose by destroying free speech than the majority.

Yeah, it seems pretty messed up, but it is a government agency making the policy so what do you expect. It would be interesting if a case did make it to the Supreme Court. I'm not sure how they would treat posters directly from the bible that are threatening. On one hand, you are clearly exercising your religion and free speech which is directly protected by the First Amendment but on the other, the courts have already found that preventing discrimination is a compelling government interest. It would be a fun case to watch.

Personally, I always come down on the side of free speech. I think Title VII should be rewritten to make if much more difficult to sue over a "hostile work environment" but I am a radical.

Thanks, that's pretty interesting.

I'm not surprised by the precedent, and I really think our disagreement boils down to the reading of the sign.  I read it as personally threatening (particularly the "you" in the sign), and very demeaning and coercive.

While I don't think a jury would likely be capable of seeing that, I do think most honest judges would.  If it were something more subtle, I wouldn't argue against it.

That's pretty ambiguous; but like I said, it's our respective reading of the sign.  I think you're desensitized

I think a court would advise a less invasive replacement, like "Christian owned business"- which wouldn't say anything about the person reading the sign, but just about the owner.

With an understanding and application of the concepts it references, I think it clearly does- in ignorance, it wouldn't because the reader wouldn't understand it.

I think if the courts considered educated atheists, or those of other religions who were familiar with Christianity enough to understand the sign, they would find that interpretation is a reasonable one.

"There is no god" is a true statement of fact which doesn't imply that people who believe in such a thing will burn forever in eternal torment, and it's very general and impersonal- it's not a prescriptive moral judgment in the same way as "he died for you" is.

The inverse equivalent would be more like "You're wasting your life believing in an imaginary god" - something personal and judgmental.  That's a statement of prescriptive judgment- that's the difference between stating a secular fact, and quoting biblical prescriptivism or stating opinions on something's worth-- that's the difference between scientific knowledge (which is objective, unbiased, and non-prescriptive), and religion (which is subjective, biased, and profoundly prescriptive).

Minority compared to religion, but there are many religious sects to argue amongst themselves- if you're talking about a coherent body of people who actually agree with each other about the foundations of what constitute reality, however, you'd be hard pressed to find a larger group (though we may disagree about everything else).

We have fact, evidence, and logic on our side- why is evolution taught in public schools?  Because it's true.

Why is it not taught that the Earth is 6,000 years old?  Because it's false.

There is something to be said for objective reality, and whenever superstition and science clash in court, there is an inevitable victor.

I'd be happy with a law that made public advertisements of falsehoods subject to civil and criminal prosecution. 

Every non-secular or non-scientific statement in the public eye would be torn down in little time, and Christians would be left quoting, "In the King James bible it says..." (true fact, it does say that), and preferably with a disclaimer that it is a literary quote that some people believe to be true, and not an assertion of fact about the world.