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“Additionally, considering you were involved with Trinity Western University, I should mention that, unlike Trinity Western University, we embrace diversity, and the right of people to sleep with or marry whoever they want, and this is reflected within some of our staff and management.”

He followed that with his comments about Christianity having “destroyed” the Norse culture.

Ms. Paquette says she was shocked to receive it. “It was definitely something you never expect to get when you’re applying for a job,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “It seemed completely wrong and over the top. It was an attack.”

She wrote back to Mr. Amundsen, noting that her “religious belief should have nothing to do with whether or not I meet your company requirements … I would like to inform you that in Canada it is illegal for employers to discriminate [against] an individual based on their religious beliefs.”

She included a brief history of Norse-Christian relations, and said she no longer wished to work for Amaruk. She signed off with a polite if provocative “God Bless.”

That seemed to infuriate Mr. Amundsen. “This is nothing new,” he wrote back the next day, Sept. 14. “People who did not agree with your church would be flayed, burnt, roasted, quartered etc. … so you guys have a long history of intolerance.

“I am not a young First Nations boy sexually abused by a priest into submission for years while locked in a concentration camp (as in residential school), but a Viking with a Ph.D in Norse History. So your propaganda is lost on me,” he continued. “‘God Bless’ is very offensive to me, and yet another sign of your attempts to impose your religious views on me.”