Hitchens gives lip-service to these Christian authors, despite his claims of erudition. Literature endeavors to reveal some truth and its beauty. Therefore, the enterprise has to presuppose some end, some ultimate source of truth. Contrary to his beliefs, that truth does not reside in Hitchens’s brain. That source is God. For if literature does not aim for the revelation of some truth, then what is the purpose of suspending disbelief? (This view, of course, contradicts the postmodern, i.e., atheistic notion of art: the solipsistic presentation of the chaos of the universe—but that is art that only its practitioners seem to enjoy and not the kind of art Hitchens is citing.)

Nor is Hitchens’s dismissal of religious faith as something that arises from primitive fear and ignorance of the workings of nature as clever or new as he imagines. He only needs to go to one of his referenced authors and read in The Brothers Karamazov, "socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question." In Devils, Dostoyevsky exposes the self-delusion of the atheistic revolutionaries who presume themselves bold and more intelligent that the God-fearing around them. In a send-up of "free-thinkers" meetings, Dostoyevsky has a female student say:

"I mean, we know, for example, the superstition about God derived from thunder and lightning . . . It’s only too well known that primitive man, terrified by thunder and lightning, deified his invisible enemy, conscious of his own weakness with regard to them."

Hitchens, like the other dilettantes writing the books on atheism, now recycles this tired argument and sells it to weekend intellectuals striking a pensive pose with The New York Times and a $4.00 latte in front of them on Sunday mornings.

Another old example that Hitchens uses to claim atheists’ moral superiority is Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac. But this citation betrays ignorance of explications made by everyone from Sunday school teachers to Kierkegaard. Hitchens brags that atheists make the best life in this life and see posterity in their children, whom they treat better than Abraham did Isaac.

But the question remains for the atheists: what do you do with children incapable of fulfilling your demands for immortality?

Hitchens also ignores Dostoyevsky’s prediction of the death toll from atheistic communist regimes. One of the characters in Devils refers to pamphlets that urge "total destruction, on the pretext that however much you try to cure the world, you won’t be able to do so entirely, but if you take radical steps and cut off one hundred million heads, thus easing the burden, it'll be much easier to leap over the ditch."

But if you go into a Christian bookstore you will not likely see Dostoyevsky on the shelf. Instead, you'll find pastel-covered saccharine tomes, the pious stories that the devout Catholic Flannery O'Connor disparaged.

The literalists, the theme park and museum builders, do to the Biblical stories what Disney does to fairy tales, stripping them of the tragic, the comic, and the sublime. In effect, what these people ask is just leave your mind at the door, get on the ride, and be happy!

But easy Christianity is vulnerable to easy atheism. Hitchens is too stupid to see the origin of art: the never-ending artistic imperative to wonder at and explore the mystery of God’s creation. It’s too bad that he has a readership prepared for him by an educational system that ignores, distorts, and disparages Christian art.