Hitchens posited that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children" and sectarian, and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience".
[6] Hitchens lays out his central thesis for this chapter: religion is not content with claims about the next world and must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers.
[7] In this vein, Hitchens addresses a hypothetical question that he was asked while on a panel with radio host Dennis Prager: if he were alone in an unfamiliar city at night, and a group of strangers began to approach him, would he feel safer, or less safe, knowing that these men had just come from a prayer meeting?
He also writes about the events following the September 11 attacks, describing how religion, particularly major religious figures, allowed matters to "deteriorate in the interval between the removal of the Taliban and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein".
He reports that even today, Muslim zealots demand that the Three Little Pigs, Miss Piggy, Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh and other traditional pets and characters be "removed from the innocent gaze of their children".
[15] He discusses the Catholic Church's response to the spread of HIV in Africa, telling people that condoms are ineffective, which, he argues, contributed to the death toll.
Hitchens says that Abrahamic religions are used to making people feel like lowly sinners, encouraging low self-esteem, while at the same time leading them to believe that their creator genuinely cares for them, thus inflating their sense of self-importance.
He says that superstition to some extent has a "natural advantage", being that it was contrived many centuries before the modern age of human reason and scientific understanding, and discusses a few examples as well as so-called miracles.
He notes that Moses "continually makes demented pronouncements ('He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord').
[26] To Hitchens, the best argument for the "highly questionable existence of Jesus", however, is biblical inconsistency, explaining the "very attempts to bend and stretch the story may be inverse proof that someone of later significance was indeed born".
Hitchens refers to The Passion of the Christ as "a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus ... produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson", who "adheres to a crackpot and schismatic Catholic sect".
He claims that Gibson did not realize that the four Gospels were not at all historical records, and that they had multiple authors, all being written many decades after the crucifixion—and, moreover, that they do not agree on anything "of importance" (e.g., the virgin birth and the genealogy of Jesus).
[30] Hitchens points out the problematic implications of the scriptural proclamation "he that is without sin among you, let him cast a first stone" with regard to the practical legislation of retributive justice: "if only the non-sinners have the right to punish, then how could an imperfect society ever determine how to prosecute offenders?"
He contends that the religion was fabricated by Muhammad or his followers and that it was borrowed from other religious texts, and the hadith was taken from common maxims and sayings which developed throughout Arabia and Persia at the time.
Hitchens dismisses the idea of seeking enlightenment through nirvana as a conceit that asks adherents to "put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals"[35] in chapter fourteen, which focuses on maladaptive and immiserating Hindu and Buddhist feudalism and violence in Tibet and Sri Lanka.
It touches on the lucrative careers of Chandra Mohan Jain and Sathyanarayana Raju, and details his observations of a "brisk fleecing" and the unstable devotees witnessed during the author's staged pilgrimage to an ashram in Pune, which was undertaken as part of a BBC documentary.
He suggests that image of "imperial-way buddhism" is not that of the original Gautama Buddha, and looks at the Japanese Buddhists who joined the Axis forces in World War II.
Chapter seventeen addresses the most common counter-argument that Hitchens says he hears, namely that the most immoral acts in human history were performed by atheists like Joseph Stalin.
Hitchens began his rebuttal by tracing the understanding of the Nazis or Stalinists, to the concept of totalitarianism probably first used by Victor Serge and then popularized by Hannah Arendt.
[39] He appreciates the difference between totalitarianism and despotism, with the former being absolutist systems that demand total surrender of the private lives and personalities of their subjects.
Chapter eighteen discusses several important intellectuals, including Socrates, Albert Einstein, Voltaire, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton.
Michael Kinsley, in The New York Times Book Review, lauded Hitchens's "logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever".
[42] Bruce DeSilva considered the book to be the best piece of atheist writing since Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), with Hitchens using "elegant yet biting prose".
[45] In The Sydney Morning Herald, Matt Buchanan dubbed it "a thundering 300-page cannonade; a thrillingly fearless, impressively wide-ranging, thoroughly bilious and angry book against the idea of God"; Buchanan found the work to be "easily the most impressive of the present crop of atheistic and anti-theistic books: clever, broad, witty and brilliantly argued".
[48] Hart says "On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens' book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them."
"[49] Responding to Hitchens's claim that "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule", Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution quotes paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.