These arguments are familiar from two recent best sellers, 'The End of Faith' by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins's 'The God Delusion.' Compared with these, 'God Is Not Great' is both more political and more personal in its attacks on believers. 'Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.' ' Religion poisons everything,' he expostulates (italics his)-from such minor pleasures as a slice of ham (Hitchens's mother and wife were born Jewish), up through sex, and on to the future of life on Earth, whose end is both predicted and welcomed by fundamentalists of all stripes.

Vitriol, of course, but the British-born Hitchens, who now lives in Washington and writes for Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications, has long been known for that. Now the world can judge what's in his heart. After a lifetime of iconoclasm, Hitchens finally takes on, in his new book, 'God Is Not Great,' the Father of all icons. Just ask the novelist Salman Rushdie, who spent a decade under fatwa of death for apostasy-or Hitchens himself, who was warned of possible reprisals merely for having Rushdie stay in his apartment. The psalmist writes, 'the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.' It takes a certain sang-froid to quote this verse in a book promoting atheism, butto the journalist Christopher Hitchens it's an opportunity to remind his readers that in the iron-fisted Kingdom of Judea, 'it would perhaps have been a fool who did not keep this conclusion buried deep inside.' Today the risks associated with heresy are smaller, although not negligible.

Christopher hitchens on god