The Proletariat of God

A fundamentalist, however affable or well-deported in public discourse, betrays himself as such in subjecting to the scathing-hot iron of criticism all but a very exactingly well-chiseled core of self-evident belief. God is not Great is written by a fundamentalist atheist named Christopher Hitchens, who provides another pillar to support the edifice that is fundamentalist atheism, joining Richard Dawkins and others in providing poorly reasoned, effusive vitriole against "religion," a concept that is amorphous not because of its vagueries as they would have us believe, but because in every multifarious expression it is precisely not any of the other expressions.

I will level a single charge against Mr. Hitchens that will hold up under any reader's scrutiny, uniting his subject matter under a rubric even he was not so successful to discover. This book is utterly illogical. In fact, I redound to say that it would benefit the student of logic to read along with his logical fallacies primer a copy of this book. This defiance of logic is not, against intuition, the necessary mark of a fundamentalist. Though it is probably quite rare, I feel safe in contending that a fundamentalist is fulsomely capable of using logic successfully in his critique of anything save his own beliefs. But far from being a profound disappointment, this book was such well-written and consistent exposition of fundamentalism from a man whose purported goal was ultimately to defend rational empiricism from the denizens of "religion" (read: irrational, delusional, idiotic hate-mongers) that the irony alone is worth a casual glance.