First of all, it is fatuous to say that Christopher Hitchens is "the smartest thinker of his generation of baby-boomers in the English-speaking world." It's just that kind of fawning flattery that causes people like him to take on Everything, including all of the wisdom of the world as it is embodied in religions.

As Joe remarks, philosophy has evolved from religion. Nietzsche, who was the descendant of several generations of clergymen on both sides of his family, said "God is dead," because he noticed that God was no longer a living force among the people he thought counted in the world. Kierkegaard said much the same thing but he stated his solution in religious terms instead of philosophical terms. (Some, including Paul Rée and Lou Andreas-Salomé thought Nietzsche was, in fact, a religious thinker.)

Hopefully, Stein is only setting up a straw man and being ironic calling Hitchens "the smartest thinker of his generation." It could be, of course, that Stein (a German) simply has a very low opinion of American and English thinkers, even though he adds, at the end of the article, "This might all sound like the book is all wrong and superfluous. That is not true."

I speak as a philosopher and atheist myself, in the Nietzschean sense, and I have seen the ravages of religion in my own family and in the world too, because I am not blind. But religion doesn't poison everything, just a lot of things; then again, so does marriage, politics and organized sport (to mention only three human institutions) as Christopher Hitchens knows, all too well.

Hitchens' genius and integrity are just the ticket for a long over due demolition of religious sanctimony and pretension; but he doesn't discuss the difference between religion and spirituality and has only a faint understanding of the latter. Spirituality has nothing to do with that inescapable aspect of religion: deductive belief. Something is true because we say it is.If someone is told that if he sits and watches his thoughts, he will find inner peace and in so doing finds this peace, that is an inductive test of the proferred suggestion. The focus in spirituality is on oneself and the opening of intuitive awareness not the mindless hewing to unproved beliefs. It's not a assault on the mind. It even strengthens the mind.
Hitchens' friend, Sam Harris, a meditator, could teach him a lot on this matter.

Mr. Hitchens overlooks the sins of secularism in order to damn religion all the better. However, after both the Holocaust and the Stalinist Terror, it is perhaps time to compare the sins of secularism to those of religion. Of course, Hitchens anticipates this and, in a move reminiscent of Goring ('A Jew is whoever I say is a Jew'), denounces both Nazis and Stalinists as 'religious'!

Well, this is the sort of 'thinking' that only convinces those already fervently convinced. So, where should we turn for enlightenment in the midst of this crises? To the Religious? No indeed, we turn to the Philosophers. Spinoza ("The Theologico-Political Treatise") begins his revolt against the Bible with this warning: "Prophets have most power among the people, and are most formidable to rulers, precisely at those times when the state is in most peril. (Preface)" Kojeve, in the most recent philosophical paean to the secular state writes: "As long as History continues, or as long as the perfect state is not realized [...] the opposition of these two points of view (the 'philosophical' and the religious or theological) is inevitable. (Introduction, p. 72)"

Yes, in the midst of the religious wars of his time Spinoza begins the long march to modernity. (Actually, our secularism has its origins in the 'Latin Averroism' of the middle ages and, later still, of course, Machiavelli.) But he points out that if the state fails to achieve peace religion will return. Perhaps we are to conclude that this was a warning that the secular ideologies failed to heed?

The history of the modern world is the history of the various secular ideologies failure to achieve peace. They either kill each other or kill their own. But kill they do. - Where do we go from here? Whenever contending forces come together, and none of them can either win or disengage, then something new emerges. We are on the cusp of the rise of something new...

Who knows? Even as I write this, some new Spinoza may be correctly working on overturning what the first Spinoza once correctly helped make... After all, there are only circumstances; the greatest difficulty is doing what circumstances require. The easiest thing is to recite the 'truths' of some secular ideology or religion.

This is why there are so few philosophers and so many believers.

Joe

Peter is so wrong---unless his comment about "rethoric rabulistic" refers to Hitchens. I fear Peter is the stone for the Church of secularism--basically a bigotted hostility to religion from the standpoint of..what what does he offer? Just "progress"? If his claim is true that the only difference between Christianity and Islam is "600 years of fight of secularism against the evil of religious organizations," then one should hope that Muslims would convert to Christianity to fast forward into the modern world: better the world-view of 2007 than the world view of 1407. By this logic, Peter seems to be saying that Muslims are just backward. So much for secular tolerance.

Excellent review by Hannes Stein. He exposes Hitchens for what he is, a sophomoric, angry opportunist atheist who just doesn't "get it" when it comes to reason and revelation. Hitchens to me seems to be a man without a soul; an empty automaton cut from the same fabric as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. They seem bent on elevating their own egos by catching the popular wave of trashing religion and God.

Hitchens seems to view all religion as "extremist Islam" bent on destroying the non-believers. For some reason, even Stein kowtows to Hitchens by proclaiming Hitchens to be "intelligent." In my view, Hitchens is as dumb as they get. His argumentation for his wild claims are swiss cheese arguments as Stein points out.

My advice to Hitchens is, "If you ain't tried it, don't knock it."

At best a nicely written article, but much less convincing than Hitchens. No real arguments, but rethoric rabulistic.
It safely can be said, that each religion is basically fundametalistic and the only difference between the Islam and the Christian religion is some 600years of fight of secularism against the evil of religious organizations. All progress in the western world always had to be wrought from religions.