(This provocative viewpoint is the subject of an entire chapter entitled, “The Koran Is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths.”) As for Mohammed, Hitchens finds his teachings to be such a hodgepodge of ideas that he hesitates to even call them a religion. Jesus is portrayed as “a rather rigid Jewish sectarian” whose statements range from the innocuous to the immoral. Gandhi comes across as a divisive figure whose legacy is “a dubious rather than a saintly one.” The Dalai Lama is painted as an exiled king who anoints Hollywood stars as enlightened beings. Hitchens’s latest book, God Is Not Great, attacks the authority of every religious figure from the Lubavicher Rebbe to Martin Luther King, Jr.

During a recent appearance at the New York Public Library, his very first utterance was a comment on Mother Teresa’s beatification: “The old bitch got it anyway.” In 2003, Hitchens met with a Vatican panel in an effort to stop a certain Nobel Prize–winning nun from achieving sainthood. Weekly writer put it, “capable of pissing into your grandmother’s fish tank.” Some would deem this an understatement. With his razor-sharp wit and blatant disregard for all things sacred, Hitchens seems, as one L.A. “I simply knew,” Hitchens would later write, “almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences.” In the green fields of England, an atheist is born.įast-forward half a century, and the child skeptic has grown up to be a formidable iconoclast. In His infinite kindness, she explains, He made the grass green, a color that would please and soothe the human eye. On this particular outing, Christopher’s religion instructor, a kindly old widow, is using the natural surroundings to demonstrate God’s love for humankind.

By all appearances, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. Nine-year-old Christopher is excelling at school and has a special fondness for Bible studies. Britain has won the war, the ruins have been repaired-the Dartmoor ponies are grazing, the grass is lush and verdant. It’s an image that could make the most hardened cynic smile: a miniature Christopher Hitchens, fair-haired and apple-cheeked, trotting across a meadow in ankle-strap sandals.

Hitchens on jefferson