A few weeks before the events of September 11, 2001, Christopher Hitchens sat on a panel with Dennis Prager, a US religious broadcaster, who challenged him to a "straight yes/no question". Prager asked Hitchens to imagine himself standing in the street of a strange city at dusk as a large group of men approached him. Would he feel safer, or less safe, Prager wanted to know, if he knew the men had emerged from a prayer meeting?
After noting that it wasn't possible to answer "yes" or "no" to such a question, Hitchens writes: "I was able to answer it as if it was not hypothetical. Just to stay within the letter 'B', I have had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk had come from religious observance."
In Belfast, Hitchens saw locals terrorised for "no other reason than membership of another confession". In Belgrade, he'd seen Croatian Roman Catholics slug it out with Christian Orthodox Serbs. In Beirut, a suicide bomber's severed head stared at him in the street outside the French embassy. And so on.
Hitchens relates this in his second chapter, Religion Kills, an overture preceding a thundering 300-page cannonade; a thrillingly fearless, impressively wide-ranging, thoroughly bilious and angry book against the idea of God, the practice of religion and the vast majority of the planet "stupid" enough to believe. It's a call, too, in an age of flourishing fundamentalisms, for a new Enlightenment, a call partially lost in the demolition.
It's a book to boot an agnostic off the fence, to invigorate atheists and anti-theists; believers will find it challenging, perhaps diabolical, most certainly offensive. But then Hitchens not only has previous form - in 2002 he accepted the invitation of the Vatican to act as Devil's Advocate arguing the case against the beatification of Mother Teresa (her support of the prohibition on condoms Hitchens thought unconscionable in an environment rife with AIDS) - he is also a laureate of contempt. He means to start a fight.
Hitchens found atheism young. God is Not Great starts with a nine-year-old Hitchens fuming at his scripture teacher Mrs Jean Watts for telling him that God "has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be."
Hitchens, despite being "frankly appalled by what she said", also registered a sympathetic shudder, before asserting what he knew to be right: "I simply knew ... that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature and not the other way about." It will surprise no-one familiar with Christopher Hitchens that he was "frankly appalled" at a very young age.
Then he sets out his stall: "There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos; that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism; that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression; and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking."
Hitchens spends about five or so of his 19 chapters dismantling monotheism's holy books. A quick sampling of the chapter titles gives an idea of his tone: Revelation: the Nightmare of the Old Testament; The "New" Testament exceeds the evil of the "Old" one; The Koran is Borrowed from Christian and Jewish myths; The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell.
His method is that of forensic sampling, tweezering out the inconsistencies in narrative, impossibilities of point of view and incriminating omissions (for example, the absence of divine injunctions against slavery or rape in the sacred texts), all the better to ridicule them as transparently the guesswork and wish-thinking of frightened, ignorant peoples. There is much bald assertion - "It goes without saying that none of the gruesome, disordered events described in Exodus ever took place" - but there is good logic, too: would the plagues, he asks, have been attributed to a vengeful God if the germ theory of disease were known at the time?
Next in his sights are "the contradictions and illiteracies" of the New Testament, a "tampered" text engineered to meet the prophecies of the Old Testament.
The Koran is condemned as a crude plagiarism of the Old and New testaments; and Muhammad is a man of "unlettered simplicity", whose claim to have transcribed the word of God is ridiculed and his morality questioned: "We may flinch a little at this mammal's betrothal to a nine-year-old girl, and at the keen interest in ... the division of the spoils after his many battles and numerous massacres."
This is easily the most impressive of the present crop of atheistic and anti-theistic books: clever, broad, witty and brilliantly argued, it takes on in one volume the scientific rationalist refutation of God found in Richard Dawkins, and the contemporary political objections found in Sam Harris, and adds the arguments and thoughts of thinkers as disparate as Freud, Hume and H.L. Mencken among many others. Rather than target one weak point hard, Hitchens goes hard at them all: faith is condemned as an overrated virtue; the holy texts are a sham; religious metaphysics are false; intelligent design is foolish; and, best argued of all, religious people are very, very dangerous.
That said, for all the entertainment and gleeful scorn, Hitchens himself is sometimes just too much. That he so clearly relishes his misanthropy - "I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance," he wrote in the foreword to his essay collection Love, Poverty and War - is the chief reason his literary criticism is so hard to believe, and disgust shadows every line of God is Not Great.
He is also occasionally guilty of crassness. For example: "In the very recent past we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity in the unpardonable sin of child rape, or as it might be phrased in Latin form, no child's behind left." Hitchens squanders a lot of trust with that vulgar lapse: readers suddenly catch sight of him chortling at his desk and it's not pretty, or funny, and it impugns his seriousness elsewhere.
(Review/Article Continues)
Why do we think mind altering substances are illegal!? Because there is a decided advantage in controlling perceptions, that keeps everything within that realm of control. Wherein it is believed green is gods work, when in truth green isn't really green at all. 
