PanThe Washington Post... an unrelenting enumeration of religion\'s sins and wickedness, written with much of the rhetorical pomp and all of the imperial condescension of a Vatican encyclical ... Hitchens says a lot of true things in this wrongheaded book...What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself ... assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna ... Readers with any sense of irony -- and here I do not exclude believers -- will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion ... Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant man, and there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading. But I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddeningly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of Hitchens\'s pet themes -- the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep.
