Come in. Have a seat.

. . . umm . . . Gees, where to begin?

Well, it boils down to this: We've had the opportunity to consult history and to review current business trends, and we found a synergistic deficiency between you and the rest of the company. And, the closer we looked at your overall performance, the clearer our only viable option became. Your business practices actually made for quite an easy decision.

The bottom line is . . . umm . . . Damn, there's just no easy way to do this. But it's been a long time coming, so let's just come out and say it, shall we?

Religion, we're going to have to let you go. You're fired!

Now, we understand the weight of this decision, and it's only natural that you're shocked. You've often seemed like an unstoppable force, especially since the rise of globalization. Hell, one would have to be blind not to see that you've even had designs on taking over the entire firm. You've established a strong presence in many of our key divisions. At the very least, you clearly felt your place in this organization was secure. The sad thing is, you've always had a little trouble seeing things as they really are outside your various ivory towers, so we understand that you didn't see this coming.

Well, there's really nothing we can do about that now. And there's no point in trying to change our minds. But do try to relax, because we've got to conduct your exit interview.

Tolerance & Respect

Religion, you've been with this firm in some form or fashion for what, about five thousand years now, give or take a couple of centuries? That's quite a long time - well, unless of course you consider that this firm has been in business for about a million years. But five thousand years is a decent stretch. And for most of that time, we honestly felt that you were at least to be tolerated. We also have been careful to show you the proper respect.

We might not be obsessed with fantasies, spirits, and magic, like you, and we don't use guilt and fear to control our employees and staff, but we viewed you with a certain measure of esteem. Heck, you've always put forth an air of authority that's very impressive, no matter how irrational and silly its foundation, or how oppressive it can be to employees who think for themselves.

And you've helped a lot of folks - provided they are desperate and don't ask too many questions about you. You always have been the brightest star in the eyes of the downtrodden, glazed over, delusional set. So for the longest time, we just felt like we had to respect you. We didn't question it often.

In all honesty, however, you never really did much that benefited the organization, even though you often take credit for a lot that this firm is hard-wired to do naturally. For example, you've always claimed that without you, morality among our associates is impossible when in reality the company was a veritable juggernaut of moral development long before you even came onto the scene.

The hunters and gatherers of our prehistoric era had already evolved to be moral creatures, because it insured trust and good team work, which in turn made the difficult project of survival easier to manage. The clans of hunters in the early days of the corporation began to form tribes. Tribes formed villages. And villages were well on their way to becoming the towns that entail the major divisions of this firm well before any of your branches and their executive VPs were even conceived.

And if your old fallacious pronouncements about morality and happiness aren't bad enough, lately, you've wasted a lot of the company's time and resources by not only giving credit for a "Creation" project to an ambiguous unseen VP of Design but you've declared him and all his magic tricks to be science. Science!

This organization has several real divisions of science that have independently verified natural explanations for creation and the proliferation and evolution of species, not to mention the development of the galaxies and star systems in the cosmos. The universe behaves exactly as it should if there were no controlling force. There's no magic architect behind the curtains, and your notions are not science, not even remotely.

The fact is, many of your initiatives are known to be baseless, going so far as to cross into fantasy. There have been several that you didn't think through entirely, and they wound up being very costly to this corporation. And to top it off, you never want to take responsibility for them.

Not that anyone can blame you. No group in this firm can foresee every contingency. But we can't ignore the enormous damage done by some of your projects. We just can't look the other way anymore.

Also, no one, from the board of directors down to the associates in the mailroom, will be forced to accept excuses like "mysterious ways" or "god's mind is unknowable" any longer when your directives go awry. We will not allow the unknowns that arise in any project's postmortem to be brushed aside by assertions of invisible tricksters or incompetent fairies. You've relied on those types of cop outs for ages, forcing other divisions to work to make discoveries in your stead, and that's simply not the way competent employees conduct themselves. That kind of attitude is detrimental to our success.

But let's step back for a moment.

Perhaps there is another dynamic at play here. You always have been a little slow on the uptake; flippantly touting any gap in natural explanation as proof of one bugaboo or another. We let that slide, too, because we felt sorry for you and didn't want to humiliate you by showcasing your low level of intelligence and poor critical thinking skills. Perhaps you are simply incapable of doing better.

That notion doesn't seem implausible under the circumstances. We've come to see you as the scruffy little kid on the playground; you know, the kid who tries, but isn't really good at anything, and who doesn't know he's not good at anything.

Now, don't get too upset by that. It's probably our fault for coddling you for so long. We got busy evolving into a worldwide conglomerate at the top of the food chain, and for too many generations, we just accepted that you were not only to be tolerated, but also respected. We simply didn't come snooping around your side of the building to see that you'd become such a hindrance to progress, and we take full responsibility.

But we've learned our lessons, and things are different now. Like the key to the executive washroom, tolerance and respect are meant for those who are truly productive and competent, and who eventually prove themselves worthy of being part of this company.

Irrationality & Perversion

Being rational and level-headed also makes an associate worthy of being part of the firm.

Your entire staff, however - in every division under your control - has proven to be prone to delusion, given the right circumstances. Seems it's difficult for those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of an ancient text to hang onto their sanity. One only need look at your teams of killer Christians to see firsthand this trend in parts of your labor force. In fact, the whole of the Christianity Division has focused on wiping out heathens, heretics, and witches on more than one occasion during your tenure.

And let's not overlook your other divisions. Some of your Jewish staff members, in their work reports, crazily claim legal rights to land from the Old Testament. Some of your African Pentecostal associates adhere to initiatives of torture, exorcism, and child abuse. Some Muslims in your Islam Department have long held policies of Jihadist slaughter. For goodness sake, a few of your Sikh groups have banded together to stop plays that expose forms of abuse within their office buildings (or what you call temples). Plays! There are even sinister Buddhist wings on your branch of the org chart. Moreover, your far-right evangelicals have kidnapped the political division in our United States market and warped its secular, liberal founding background.

The short of it is, the policies of intense belief, incantations, secrecy, and all-male rituals among your staff have traditionally bred perversions and danger, abuse of women and children, and infected young men with frenzy, no matter what the claimed mission statement of the division. There's no way for this firm to see that behavior as anything but irrational and counter-productive.

Stagnation & Sexual Oppression

Now, perhaps this meeting should have taken place early in your career when there was still such a high turnover rate among your executive VPs and their employees due to general ignorance of the world and the pervasiveness of superstition. It certainly should have occurred after your "Crusades" project was such a disaster, or even after your "Inquisition" campaign set the company back so many years; because since then, you haven't changed your MO much at all. Seems so many of your ideas have involved conflicts between two different groups of your own staff members, and perhaps we should have recognized the infighting as a weakness a long time ago. But we didn't, and for that we express our regret.

We should emphasize further that our displeasure with your performance has not solely been the result of one thing in particular. It is more a consequence of the steady, day-by-day assault by your immediate reports on everything the rest of us have gained in the last five centuries. For some inexplicable reason, you and your folks did not appreciate the Enlightenment, and you all are trying damn hard to reverse it.

Initially, your push to return to the Dark Ages was annoying at worst, but now it's really become problematic.

For example, why do you still think that your self-righteous, celibate, middle-aged managers with heads full of fantasies should be the ones to tell people what can and can't be included in a sex education class? In what branch of business would something so ridiculous be tolerated? This is no longer the age of inbred rulers who are too stupid to act unless they first consult with your ghosts and fairies, and we don't want to return to that age.

By the way, what is it with you and sex? Why do your various VPs, the ones you call "Gods", keep poking their noses into people's bedrooms, hot tubs, and airplane lavatories anyway? Don't take this the wrong way, but you seem very ignorant of good sex? Is that why you're so obsessed with telling our associates what they can or can't do for fun? Because we can't imagine that any of your Gods, if they were actually real, would care one way or the other? If you ask us, your anti-sex project is getting old, not mention a little weird.

There are many other examples of your twisted progressivism that we can point to as well. For example, why do you still think that a misogynistic managers in your Islam Division with heads full of slightly different fantasies than the self-righteous codgers in your Christianity office should be the one to dictate what female associates must wear. What gives them the right to hide millions of women from the world and prevent them from being comfortable simply because they cannot restrain their lust at the smallest bit of exposed flesh?

Come on, Religion, even you have to wonder why they can't just leave the women alone and go take a cold shower - Your mullahs, your underlings, are the problem, not those fine ladies.

Politics & Moral Superiority

Honestly, some of your team members are such huge embarrassments to the firm, and yet, you've done nothing to bring them into the 21st century. In fact, you've made it possible for some of those cavemen to become heads of state, and the power they wield in the name of one god or another has resulted in a lot of people being dead, whether it be from war, genocide, or the ever-popular difference in belief systems.

We let our Government Division solicit the opinions of these unrepresentative blowhards on legislation when they actually know even less than the average politician.

There are state-endorsed projects where obscure writings and freely-interpreted passages in your various instruction manuals grant young, angry, disillusioned members of your staff the excuses to do heinous things to innocent people. We can no longer tolerate this type of stupidity and arrogance, and we will not. The Government Division is very important to the firm - the entire firm - and this must stop.

Of course, this whole thing is not entirely your fault. As we mentioned before, we must stand up and take some responsibility for letting things get out of control. There has been a little too much tolerance in the name of inclusion and multiculturalism, and we should have addressed these more fully in your last 300 or so performance reviews. There's no doubt, however, that tolerance in the name of multiculturalism will be a less dangerous prospect when multiculturalism no longer has you as its base element.

If someone on your staff is spouting irrational nonsense in the political arena, there is no reason that we shouldn't tell him so, regardless of whether he or she is wearing a clerical collar, a yarmulke, a miter, a red string, or any of the other badges and odd costumes your team members are so fond of. We've admittedly not been diligent in this regard, although improving upon it is one of our own personal objectives for the next quarter.

In addition to your dangerous political influence, we can no longer allow your staff members to mount their moral high-horses and look down on the rest of us. Our associates are not babies in need of supposed morally superior handholding.

If a portion of your bigoted staff decides to foist its outmoded views on the rest of the firm as to what is deemed acceptable in movies, television, the theatre, or in print, we must tell them to shove it, in no uncertain terms. We will not let them ruin the company picnic for the rest of us ever again. Those picnics are meant to be fun, and your people have been sucking the life right out of them for too long.

We now realize that just because someone works under you and harbors an assortment of irrational and contradictory beliefs does not mean they are necessarily worthy of being heard. You hired them and gave them access to corporate communication tools, and we let them voice their philosophies far too often. But we will not play that game anymore.

From here on out, they must explain their political and moral views on their own behalf, for without you in this company, they will have no holy management endorsement to claim for their petty hang-ups, prejudices, and phobias. We cannot let you be their security blanket, their get-out-of-jail-free card, their protection, any longer.

Anyone who claims with certainty to know the mind of some supernatural director or VP does not deserve or need our respect. What they need is psychiatric help to stand on their own two feet and to stop appealing to a dubious authority to give weight to what are no more than their personal opinions.

Religion, just because your staff believes that there is something beyond the physical world, it does not make them special in any way. If anything, they are to be pitied for being unable to appreciate our amazing universe without you as a crutch. Can you not see this? When a single image of countless galaxies captured by the Hubble telescope conveys more awe and mystery than any Iron Age tribal god, it should be painfully obvious.

Irrational beliefs simply are not admirable. They are a threat to the future of this firm and the rest of the biosphere.

In Conclusion

As individuals, we only have one life. This is not a rehearsal. There is no heaven with angels floating around singing, nor is there a paradise with 72 willing virgins waiting to reward acts of murder. No one is getting raptured out of here. Your staff is not "chosen". Deluded, perhaps, but not chosen, and that is your doing.

No one needs the promise of a reward after death to be a good and kind associate - nor does anyone need threats of hellfire. Sympathy for others, charity, and kindness are possible without you in this company - the so-called Golden Rule is not your initiative; it is a policy that predates your employment here. It's a humane way of conducting business, common to many cultures, and has been since before you and will be when you are gone.

Not one of your various departments has the answers. In fact none of them do, and the sooner they realize that we are all in this together, groping our way toward a better life for everyone on this planet and not just a chosen few, the better for this company and the creatures with whom we share this planet.

Good-Bye

Well . . . umm . . . That about covers it. We hope that we've been clear in all we've said in this exit interview. We truly thank you for listening. Unfortunately, given the circumstances, we will be unable to act favorably on your behalf as a reference.

Religion, your doctrines and ideas are not so much outmoded as they are obsolete, and as such we cannot, in good conscience, recommend they be used in any high-profile organization for the rest of our time in this universe.

Again, we're sorry that it has come to this, and that we couldn't work things out, but this is something that must be done.

Now, if there is nothing further, we'll wish you no specific harm, and bid you good day.

Please leave your co-tag and your ID badge with the receptionist, and security personnel will escort you off the premises.

Oh, and Happy Holidays.