There are several reasons why I don’t want to admire Christopher Hitchens’s new book: I don’t want to be brow-beaten by someone deemed one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Prospect; he once wrote mockingly about my dear uncle Maurice, the former Bishop of Norwich; he once went off with a pretty girl I thought I was talking to; he’s cleverer, richer and more famous than I am. None of which, I admit, is a rational reason to dislike his book; but then Hitch isn’t very rational either, though he likes to pretend he is. He’s a grand rhetorician, and his double-barrelled shotgun of a book is high entertainment.

With his first barrel, he demolishes many of the claims of established religions, and with the (more original) second, he demonstrates the catastrophic effect these bad faiths have on the modern world. Primitive, harsh, desert-nomad conceptions of a vengeful Father-God are bad enough; but couple such Dark Age beliefs with 21st-century weaponry and you have a problem that is not merely philosophical. It leads along a corpse-strewn trail straight to the Twin Towers.

In general, Hitchens is free from Richard Dawkins’s immature oedipal triumphalism (“How stupid our forefathers were! Those gullible Christian know-nothings!”) though he does describe the schoolmen debating “with fanatical intensity” how many angels can dance on a pinhead. This is a canard. There is no evidence medieval theologians worried about this, although St Thomas Aquinas did worry about whether there would be excrement in Paradise. (The answer’s no; but no flowers either, sadly.) The angels problem, meanwhile, was solved in 1995 by a rationalist modern scientist, Phil Schewe, who announced that the answer was 10²⁵.

The two lengthy chapters of biblical criticism are surprisingly old-fashioned, but Hitchens’s stern portrait of the historical Jesus (rude to his mother, had little time for Gentiles, scorned any notion of worldly security, because the world was about to come to an end soon anyway) is all good stuff. Equally admirable is his bold critique of Islam, where Dawkins pussyfoots like a Labour MP in a marginal seat in Yorkshire. The religion of Muhammad is “arrogant and insufferable”, “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms”, and “I simply laugh when I read the Koran.” Hitchens sees Islam’s growing tendency to violence as a sign that its end is nigh. The “mirthless cretins of jihad” know their “sacred book” is a muddle, the House of Islam is built on sand, and the encounter with modernity, when undertaken, will destroy it. Islam’s bloody reaction to the 21st century is no confident, imperialistic resurgence, but its spasmodic death throes. One prays he is right.

Nor does he have any truck with the mysterious Wisdom of the East. Kind of, more holistic, less linear, yeah? Yeah, right. The Dalai Lama “tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her”; he was also very keen on India’s nuclear tests. And anyone who starts boring you with “there’s never been a Buddhist war” should go to Sri Lanka, where “the contending forces are mainly Buddhist and Hindu”.

The counter-argument to all this religion-bashing, that 20th-century atheist regimes weren’t exactly humane either, is swiftly dismissed. Stalin and Pol Pot were Grand Marxist muftis presiding over their worshippers, Hitchens claims, quoting his beloved George Orwell: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” But his argument here forms a perfect circle: all wicked rulers are in essence religious, and therefore all religion is wicked. Absurd, too, is the sweeping claim that “charity and relief work . . . are the inheritors of modernism and the Enlightenment” and therefore nothing to do with religion. Oh, piffle. Who ran the original St Bartholomew’s hospital? Equally daft, but endearing, is his pronouncement on the crucifixion. “Had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it.” The image of Hitchens huffing up Golgotha to remonstrate with a couple of granite-faced legionaries fills me with a strange delight. Furthermore, you can’t dislike a man who is so observant of pigs, and “their tendency to random and loose gallantry . . . often painful to the more fastidious eye”.

All this stylish unfairness and wit is tremendously good fun. As with Voltaire, his scornful laughter is a powerful weapon. But as with Voltaire, his demolition of traditional religion is finally missing something, which you find, say, in the poetry of Thomas Hardy: a sense of the deep psychic wound caused by the rupture with our immediate past and our forebears when we wave goodbye to our religion; and the subsequent pathos of our post-religious cosmic loneliness.

God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion by Christopher Hitchens

Atlantic £17.99 pp307

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