Johann Hari

The legion enemies of Christopher Hitchens have long argued that he has declined into a premature alcoholic senility where he can only belch and flail about incoherently. This dazzling three-hundred page howl against religion will bitterly, brutally disappoint them. It shows Hitchens can still intellectually get it up - and how.

Hitchens has passed through many phases in his political life, from Trotskyite leftist to Wolfowitzian neoconservative, but there has always been a single animating core to his thought: an intense loathing of religion. He is not merely an atheist. He is an anti-theist, convinced that the idea of God has been a disaster for humanity, leading us up a hundred blind-alleys of sexual repression, hallucination and sectarian slaughter. Here, he redefines organised superstition - 'religion' - as humanity's real "original sin".

As with Friedrich Nietzsche's 'The Genealogy of Morals', Hitchens' approach here is primarily historical, tracing the major religions back to their origins and showing how they were plainly fabricated by divinely-uninspired mammals. Why does the 'Virgin' Mary have "no memory of the Archangel Gabriel's visitation, or of the swarms of angels, both telling her she is the mother of god?" he asks. "In all accounts, everything her son does comes to her as a complete surprise. What can he be doing talking to rabbis in the temple?" Why does the 'Prophet' Mohammed receive convenient messages from Allah sanctioning whatever he wants to do, including having sex with a nine-year old child?

The answer, to Hitchens, is obvious, and derived from Ludwig Feuerbach's great insight: God did not create man. Man created god, cobbling him together from a string of half-understood events and rumours. He points out we can actually see how religions are born, live on film. The 1964 documentary 'Mondo Cane' showed the reaction of Pacific Islanders exposed for the first time to Westerners. They concluded that the white interlopers were "their long-mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave." On the island of Tana, they had a "revelation" that an American GI called John Frum was their redeemer, and to this day, they hold ceremonies proclaiming that the savior Frum will return.

Hitchens does not just attack the easy religious targets - the Falwells and Bin Ladens. He shows how even the warm fuzzy faces of religion can be repellent. He has shown before how Mother Teresa was a corrupt, malignant dwarf who left people to die in agony because "Christ loves suffering." Here, he takes apart the grossly over-rated figure of Mahatma Gandhi, who loathed modernity and medicine, advised the Jews to commit suicide in the face of the Holocaust, and played a much less impresisve role in the battle for Indian independence than the secular Nehru. Ditto the Dalai Lama, whose "one-man rule in [his] Indian enclave is absolute" and who sells dispensations to ludicrous figures like 'actor' Steven Segal.

Stirred into this historical account are some delicious puncturing barbs at the faithful. Do Christians, Jews and Muslims imagine, he asks, that before Moses received the Ten Commandments, he thought murder and theft were good ideas?

In early September 2001, Hitchens was asked a hypothetical by the religious broadcaster Dennis Prager. Imagine you are in a strange town, and a large group of young men are approaching you. Would you feel more or less safe if you knew they had just come from a prayer meeting? Hitchens replied that, just to stick to the letter 'B', he had enjoyed that very experience in Blefast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad - and every time, he would have felt safer being approached by atheists. The prayer meeting-loving jihadists promptly proved his point in New York City the following week.

The tract is sprinkled with one-liners: the Catholic Church's motto could be "no child's behind left", he quips, and the Church of England is what you get when you "build a religion on the family values of Henry VIII." This is partly why 'God is Not Great' is currently the best-selling book in the United States, and the crest of a tsunami of re-energised atheism. Hitchens neatly dispenses with many of the criticisms that are being thrown at himself, Richard Dawkins and its other exponents.

Firstly, they claim atheism is "arrogant". But this is the precise opposite of the truth. At its core all atheists say is that, in the absence of evidence, it is absurd to believe. What could be more humble than sticking scrupulously to fact and reason? More to the point, Hitchens notes, "How much vanity must be concealed... in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?"

Secondly, they claim the New Atheism critiques only fundamentalist religion. Reza Aslam, for example, has claimed that the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris school has the same literalist reading of religious texts as fundamentalists, poring through (say) the genocidal statements of the Old Testament God and taking them as factually true. But how many religious people in the world have reduced their texts to mythology and metaphor? How many would say their religious text contains no truth-claims about the material world? A few - a very few. For the vast majority of believers, this critique still pertains.

Hitchens is less adept when dealing with the third major criticism: what about Stalin and Mao, the atheist mass murderers? Don't they puncture Hitchens' thesis that "all major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form - of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one"? He responds by redefining Stalinism and Maoism as political religions, even offering Lysenkoism as Stalin's "miracles."

There is a more convincing atheist answer. Only the most naive nineteenth century forms of atheism, the ones that imagined ending religion would end evil, are discredited by Stalin. A more mature atheism acknowledges that faith - belief without evidence - is one form of bad thinking among many. Just as eradicating smallpox did not cure cancer, discrediting faith would not cure communism, fascism and other delusions - but it would still be worth doing, because faith on its own claims many victims. Besides, most atheists do not simply have a negative anti-religious vision; they advocate the rationalism and adherence to evidence of the Enlightenment - the best remedy for all these delusions.

If there is a flaw to this book, it is that Hitchens' atheism sometimes takes on a misanthropic tone. He opens the book by quoting the eleventh century Persian poet Omar Khayyam: "And do you think that unto such as you/ A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew/ God gave a secret?" The idea that humanity is "maggot-minded" keeps recurring: he refers to "our miserly endowment of cranial matter" and laments that humanity has a natural "gullibility, herd instinct and... need to be credulous." He jokes at one point that this planet is "a prison and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilisations." It's hard not to think of the mysterious central character in his friend Martin Amis' novel 'Night Train', who commits suicide because she concludes that thsi mediocre world can never match her own fabulousness.

But Hitchens is supple enough to sense this flaw, and to counteract it a little. He stresses that the new Enlightenment he advocates as a remedy for superstition "is within the compass of the average person." He approvingly quotes the much more life-affirming atheism of Jospeh Conrad: "The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is... I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural."

The book is full of pin-pricks of sanity and hope like this. Every child stuck in every "faith school" should be bought a copy. A campaign to put this glittering anti-theist tract on the national curriculum - alongside the Bible, Koran and the other insufferable staples of "religious education" - should begin here.

You can send comments on this article for publication in the Independent at letters -at- independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read my interview with Christopher Hitchens from 2004 here. You can also read my review of Sam Harris' book 'The End of Faith' here, other articles about religion here, and other book reviews here.

There's a dimwitted religious response to this article here and an interesting discussion of the article over at Richard Dawkins' website here.