This is Hitch versus God, slugged out to the bloody death.

But even his title, the negative of Allahuh Akhbar, the legend Saddam inscribed on the Iraqi flag, implies a certain greatness in the author. Even the most diehard non-believer may balk slightly at the notion of Hitchens as an alternative deity. Having sharpened his ire on targets such as Mother Teresa, whom he once denounced as a fanatic, he now takes on an opponent he may consider to be more his own size. After Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, Hitchens is the latest fire-and-brimstone atheist. On this foundation, an anti-God industry has set out its groaning bookstall. Guilty of misogyny, child abuse and fraud on a monumental scale, it is 'a plagiarism of a plagiarism, of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion'. Religion, in God Is Not Great, is 'violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry'. Unlike one of his rationalist heroes, John Stuart Mill, who wrote of his rare status as someone 'who has not thrown off religious belief but never had it', Hitchens has had to jettison a jumble bag of faiths. Hitchens has been 'an Anglican, educated at a Methodist school, converted by marriage to Greek Orthodoxy. If not a binge-worshipper, he was a serial congregant, grazing on a buffet of faiths. For such a rabid God-hater, Christopher Hitchens has a very pious background.

The book god is not great