Protesting too much

Christopher Hitchins writes with exuberance and a sense of the great emancipation which he supposes modern knowledge offers humanity. ‘Scepticism and discovery have freed them from the burden of having to defend their god as a footling, clumsy, straws-in-the-hair mad scientist,’ he says of religious believers, whom he invites to abandon their faith and to embrace ‘reason’ — though should they choose not to do so, he insists, they are at liberty to believe whatever they like, ‘as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion’. This book is a lengthy denial of religious belief, and an advocacy of atheism rendered in the familiar tones of evangelical assurance. Both the content of Hitchins’ critique, as it happens, and the amusing polemical verbiage in which it is delivered, are strangely old-fashioned, however, and are presumably derived from the works of Thomas Paine, whose strident atheism provoked horror 200 years ago (but fails to do so now).