"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." These words were penned by Voltaire in 1770, and together they express a surprising sentiment to come out of the mind of one of the Enlightenment's most vocal critics of religion: religion is a necessary fabric of society. The 20th century was not so generous, having given us, till recently, the loudest lampooner of religion in the form of H.L. Mencken. Yet even out of his craggy heart, Mencken could dig out some mote of respect for honest, church-going people.

Christopher Hitchens, who is perhaps the closest to a Mencken of our time, takes an even harder line with religion. In his new book, "god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," the pugnacious Vanity Fair columnist argues that religious faith is not only false and unnecessary but unworthy of respect and in some cases a "threat to human survival."

Hitchens has made a career out of assailing big fish, hook, line, and sinker, including Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, and now God. Some might conclude from this track record that Hitchens latest polemical is nothing more than the ravings of another opportunistic controversialist. They would, of course, be making a mistake. Hitchens has written on a wide array of topics with equal passion, whether on the Israel-Palestine conflict or, in the past, the deleterious US involvement in Central America. But if not for any other reason, Hitchens' latest book should be taken seriously because he has given us one of the most trenchant and eloquent critiques of religion since Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian.

In short, Hitchens critique of religion come down to four main points: that it misrepresents the origins of humankind and the cosmos, demands unreasonable suppression of human nature, inclines people to violence and blind submission to authority, and expresses hostility to free inquiry.

Not all of these charges, however, are lobbed with equal vigor. Hitchens does not spend much time on the subject of intelligent design, writing it off as half-baked solipsism with its arrogant belief that our speck of dust of a planet, when measured against the universe, is the point of it all. And contrary to those who think religion and science do not overlap and can thus coexist, including the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould; or to others like Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who think science and religion complement each other, Hitchens thinks science, or more specifically the scientific theory of evolution, and intelligent design are irreconcilable.

Reader E-mail "I am reacting to the person of Hitchens, a sad, misguided shell of a man..." More ›

For him, finding design in the same violently callous evolutionary process that has weeded out 98 percent of all species to have appeared on earth is like finding the image of a house in a Pollock painting. And then there is the "God is in the details" argument. Collins sees God's design in our DNA; but Hitchens cannot imagine a competent designer equipping humans with useless gene artifacts, otherwise known as "junk DNA," anymore than he can imagine a competent designer equipping a new jetliner with old, useless parts.

Hitchens, it should be noted, is not merely an atheist but an anti-theist. Unlike many atheists, who mourn God's death, anti-theists are glad there is no evidence for the existence of God.

Hitchens for his own part appears to liken the idea of a surveillance God tallying up our sins, even the unavoidable ones such as lust and envy, to a celestial version of Big Brother from George Orwell's 1984. In short, Hitchens could have written the lines for the character John Milton, a.k.a. Satan, in the movie The Devil's Advocate, who quipped that "God likes to watch. He's a prankster. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does He do, I swear for His own amusement, his own private, cosmic gag reel, He sets the rules in opposition."

So with all of this surveillance and rules attempting to harness our sinful nature, has religion made people behave? Hitchens answers with an unequivocal and resounding "No!" and buttresses his claim by drawing from a long religious history soiled with religious wars, crusades, inquisitions, racism and militant anti-intellectualism to present-day unwholesome expressions of piety.

Taking the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as the most salient example, Hitchens points out that finding a solution would have been easy had the conflict not been mired in religious disputes.

"The solution was, obviously, to create two states side by side," he writes. "Surely something so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass? And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it. But the exclusive claims to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war."

If Hitchens had rested his case against religion here, he would be guilty of straw-manning religion by judging it on the record of its worst followers (though he is not reticent in trotting out some embarrassing facts about some revered religious figures such as Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Joseph Smith, and the Dalai Lama). But he does not stop here; he moves to the very canons of religion, specifically the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran (which he considers a feeble plagiarism of the former two) to show that religious texts have served as a how-to manual for irrationality and violence. In a chapter titled "Revelation: The Nightmare of the 'Old' Testament," Hitchens is puzzled that a book which condones genocide, slavery, rape, indiscriminate massacre and the murder of "witches," homosexuals and disobedient children is widely endorsed as a proper foundation for morality.

And in the New Testament, which casts God in a softer light, we stumble into what Hitchens considers one of the worst cruelties of Christianity (and later Islam): the threat of an eternal punitive hell, a teaching that for centuries had been used to frighten children into believing what their parents or religious leaders did. "Perhaps Thomas Paine was not wrong in saying that he could not believe in any religion that shocked the mind of a child," writes Hitchens.

At this point, one could safely assume that Hitchens wants the death of religion. Oddly enough, he doesn't. Differing with fellow anti-theist Richard Dawkins, who thinks religious ideas were not evolutionarily adaptive but merely virus-like "memes" that have replicated by infecting generation after generation of gullible people, Hitchens sees religion as simply a reflection of our partly evolved brain with its adrenal glands that are too big and its prefrontal lobes that are too small. Religion will not die, he says, "or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other."

What Hitchens really wants to toss into the pyre is religious coercion, whether it is parents scaring children into belief with the idea of Hell, American religious groups attempting to ban stem cell research or foist creationism into the classrooms, the Catholic Church bewailing that condom-use is worse than AIDS, or the Islamic fanatics who are trying to impose their more militant brand of religion on the rest of the world. These are all issues that any secularist, religious or non-religious, who values a liberal democracy cannot afford to ignore.

Hitchens closes his book with a chapter called "The Need For a New Enlightenment," in which he asks us to eschew blind credulity; to resolve our ethical dilemmas not with outmoded religious texts but with the literature of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Schiller and Dostoyevsky; to pursue unfettered scientific inquiry; and to divorce sexual life from fear and tyranny. Well over a century ago, the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called for a similar new enlightenment, yet the century that followed his was plagued by blind credulity which in turn hoisted dangerous wannabe demigods to the helms of several nations.

Today, when our personal freedoms are stronger than ever, we are seeing a resurgence of this dangerous credulity. What better time for Hitchens to fight the good fight for free thought, and to defend the enlightenment values that helped shaped the US Constitution and the Virginia Statue on Religious Freedom authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

This is all well and good — with one reservation. Hitchens' subtitle, while catchy, is misleading. It is a statistical fact that the majority of religious people support the separation of church and state and practice their religion in an innocuously personal way. Religion also enriches people's lives and gives them hope in their darkest moments. When Hitchens says religion "poisons everything" or is a "threat to human survival," he is only half right. He certainly gives us egregious examples of religious people or religious teachings that would cause any sensible person to recoil. But one wonders how much of what Hitchens takes to task is religion as a motive or religion as an excuse.