Christopher Hitchens
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Twelve, 320 pages, $24.99
In the January 5 Wall Street Journal, Sam Schulman detected a proliferation of public atheists, and decided it wasn’t their arguments but their tone that was new to him. Why did this Enlightenment Brigade charge at believers with the saber-rattling of “contumely and condescension”? In any case, he wrote, their books don’t contain “a single point you didn’t hear in your freshman dormitory.”
John Derbyshire took this tack in his New York Sun review of Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation: “Here are the knottiest conundrums of theodicy presented as if they never occurred to anyone at all before last Tuesday.” True, Harris’s tract addresses little that curious men haven’t grappled with at some point—though Aquinas never asked, as Harris fatuously does, why the Bible fails to predict the popularity of the Internet.
The trouble is, pace Schulman, the globe teems with religious people who will never see the inside of a freshman dormitory, who would be at best stupefied and at worst inflamed to violence by even the flimsiest of Harris’s gambits. One shudders to think what they’d do to Christopher Hitchens, whose new book brims with objections to religion—some provocative, some “faltering and childish … partly because no religion can meet them with satisfactory answers,” and some merely faltering and childish.
Think back to the dorm: the pious Student Council man, fresh off the Corn
