Author: Christopher Hitchens

If you haven’t read it, you will almost certainly have seen it: the critique of Professor Richard Dawkins that arraigns him for being too “strident” in his confrontations with his critics. According to this line of attack, Dawkins has no business stepping outside the academy to become a “public intellectual” and even less right to …

It seems to me nothing short of extraordinary and embarrassing that a well-advertised white-supremacist lunatic should have had the time to assemble the ingredients of what seem like two possible fertilizer detonations—the most commonplace type, that is to say—and then to explode them in a vulnerable part of the capital city of a Scandinavian democracy. …

Reporting on the capture of the mass-murdering General Ratko Mladic by the Serbian government on Memorial Day, the New York Times summarized the newly created political situation like this: “Critical questions remain about precisely who protected Mr. Mladic. The pro-Western government of President Boris Tadic says it will investigate, a politically delicate examination that could …

I don’t think that a single newspaper or magazine article on Egypt has ever failed to mention the presence, in the wings of Egyptian politics, of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s one of those learned references that is de rigueur for every commentator and analyst. Yet it was notable, as both the Egyptian and the Tunisian …

One of the pleasures of trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the religious worldview is noticing the convolutions that this view keeps inflicting upon itself. Last November brought news of two small but significant developments of this kind, both tending to vindicate the essential atheist or materialist contention that religion is …

The argument about whether or not to have a memorial mosque in the vicinity of the Ground Zero of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on downtown New York City is currently being conducted on lines that are distressingly simplistic. As with some similar disputes in Europe, it seems to pit chauvinistic and xenophobic forces …

The sound of collapsing scenery from the general direction of the Vatican is deafening enough, but it is nothing compared with the screeching noises given off by the pope’s apologists. One gets the sense that some sort of desperate “line of the day” was promulgated around the time of Easter and that it was agreed …

In January 2010, I was a guest on the excellent national radio show hosted by the devout Christian Hugh Hewitt. The people of Port-au-Prince had just been buried in rubble, and his first question to me was rightly about the calamity that had overtaken an already miserable Haiti. I informed him that the former presidential …

Toward the end of a recent debate between myself and a believing Presbyterian fundamentalist, my opponent offered the following poem from C.S. Lewis: Lead us, Evolution, lead us Up the future’s endless stair; Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us For stagnation is despair: Groping, guessing, yet progressing, Lead us nobody knows where. The …

At the end of June, the New York City Council passed a nonbinding resolution that is sure to mark the beginning of a long and miserable dispute. The resolution called for the addition of two Muslim religious holidays to the number of days that the city’s schoolchildren already get to take as vacation. To this …

As I watched the presidential inaugural address in the freezing but sunlit atmosphere on top of the Voice of America building in Wash­ington, D.C., where I was lucky enough to have secured a media perch, I was at first too impressed by the occasion itself to notice something possibly significant about the speech. It’s not …

When I first published my book God Is Not Great, I asked my publishers to issue a challenge to the faithful and to try substituting a debate tour for the usual book tour. One of the first to pick up this gauntlet was Douglas Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a senior …

In the middle of July, just as I was about to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, I received a call from an Australian radio station asking if I would comment on the Roman Catholic Church’s sponsorship of World Youth Day. I couldn’t at first guess what this bizarre event in Sydney …

The sixtieth anniversary of the statehood of Israel is a useful occasion to review the relationship between Jewishness and secularism. It’s a noticeable fact that in the atheist and agnostic ranks of many countries, Jews are very much in the fore. It is so noticeable, indeed, that I was recently asked by the Spertus Institute …

The most recently published findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life have been garnering attention for one principal reason, and receiving insufficient attention for a less evident one. To take the more obvious reason first, the latest research shows that religious allegiance in the United States is much weaker than most people …

Insufficient attention has been given to the role of religion in helping to impose and reinforce the largest and fastest-growing dictatorial system in the modern world. I am referring to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is well on its way to becoming a one-party system to rival the former Communist one, with a police apparatus to …

I remember Professor Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great Polish intellectual dissidents from the Stalinist period, saying that when he debated with apologists for the system, he often found himself almost on the losing side. This was because the arguments of his opponents were so antiquated that he’d forgotten what the original refutations were. (Another …

A question that interests me very much (and always has) is this: I know that I do not believe in either any god or any religion, and I can give my reasons in a manner that the other side can at least understand, but can the same be said for those who claim that they …

Even as a series of car-bomb attacks (apparently planned by Islamist members of the medical profession) were convulsing the United Kingdom, an outbreak of torrential rain in Yorkshire left thousands of people homeless across the northern part of the country. British weather is notoriously bad but seldom freakish, so another opportunity presented itself for speculation …

I once heard the late Abba Eban, formerly foreign minister of Israel, address a dovish Jewish audience in New York. In that rather plummy British-English accent of his, he began by saying that what struck the eye first, in any contemplation of the Israel-Palestine dispute, was the simplicity and ease of its solution. That was …

When I was a schoolboy in England, the term Christendom was still in use. It featured mainly in history classes and in archaic sermons, but the presumption of “civilization” as Christian (even more than as “Western”) was still half-alive in the minds of authority. So were the corresponding terms for the less fortunate or enlightened, …

I found myself profoundly depressed by the decision of American atheists and nonbelievers to hold a demonstration and rally, the Godless Americans March on Washington, last November, and, although I live in the nation’s capital, I made no effort to add myself or my family to the turnout. This refusal was for two reasons. First, …