A COMPUTER expert has been sacked after taking a stand against a company training programme which he says conflicted with his Christian beliefs. Paul Mansbacher, 43, a committed Baptist, says a motivational course - run by electronics giant Digital in Ayr, was 'Satanic' and tried to turn participants way from traditional Christianity and towards Eastern religions.

Days after walking out of one of the programmes [In fact, I refused to participate in a project at work known as a FIT Audit, which was intended to assess how much the group I worked with was in line with the principals taught on the course Increasing Organisational Effectiveness. - PFM] and making his views known to his bosses, Mansbacher was suspended from his job as systems manager and later sacked. The US-owned firm will only say it was a "performance-related dismissal".

In the US there have been several well-publicised lawsuits involving Christians who said they were sacked for objecting to courses in so-called New Age thinking, but this is believed to be the first such case in the UK.

The US Federal Equal Opportunity Commission decreed a year ago that under the Civil Rights Act people should have the right not to participate in training if it conflicted with their religious beliefs.

Mansbacher says the course, called Improving Organisation Effectiveness, tried to "unfreeze" people's personalities and re-form them in a way the company felt was appropriate to their work. It tried to change their thinking from 'machine age' to 'systems age'.

Mansbacher says they were pushing ideas that flew in the face of his born-again Christian beliefs.

"In one discussion they argued the case for us creating a new personality for God. They said a God of the old machine age would be an individual you could get to know and that he was a creator. They then said that notion was history.

"In the systems age, they said, God should be seen as an all-containing system in which we are part of God.

"He wasn't a creator because he couldn't create ['himself' is missing from the text here - PFM]. Then they said that concept of God could be found in some Eastern religions"

That part of the course has since been removed, but Mansbacher believes those ideas underpin the rest of the programme. The Zimbabwe-born Baptist also had reservations about how the week-long residential course, held in Nice in the South of France was run. The instructors, he says, did not give enough support and counselling to participants who found the intense soul-searching too difficult to handle.

He feels strongly that participants in this type of course should be made fully aware that they are not just going to learn a new management technique or business philosophy. "At the very least people should be told it could change their personalities."

Mansbacher, who now has a temporary job with Scottish Homes in Edinburgh, has been told he cannot take his case to an industrial tribunal because he had not been a full employee of Digital for the statutory two years, but his lawyers are still pursuing the case to get the company to change its reason for his dismissal.

Three months ago Scotland on Sunday revealed that American courses promoting so-called New Age thinking were being used by a growing number of firms in Scotland such as the Clydesdale Bank, the South Of Scotland Electricity Board and Hewlett Packard.

The Scottish Office is still considering whether or not to offer motivational training courses developed by a Seattle company called the Pacific Institute to thousands of civil servants.

New Age courses promote the idea that people can use psychological techniques to transform their lives. By using them effectively, it is claimed, people can achieve anything they want, utilising the "95% of each person's potential that goes untapped". Under-performers, whether in life or business, are simply not trying hard enough