Last week I finished Christopher Hitchens‘ newest book and current best-seller, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, thus completing a Trinity of recent readings about God which included Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion and Francis Collins‘ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

While I found Dawkins’ book intelligently written and informative I found it too condescending to be enjoyable. His seeming contempt at all who have believed in the Divine prior to the age of scientific enlightenment, while understandable, is hard to take page after page. Collins, a born again Christian, pro-Darwinist and head of the Human Genome Project, provides a welcome ballast to multitudes of undernourished zealots who find in science nothing more than pagan contradictions to the Holy Word of God. The Language of God provided a number of illuminating anecdotes (and theoretical similarities to Dawkins’ book) but Collins’ own faith seems to be more deeply influenced by the words and concepts of C.S. Lewis than that of the Bible itself.

Hitchens, however, struck a long dormant chord within my internal skeptic and successfully disrupted some of my already tenuous beliefs. Although the book is by no means an all inclusive manifesto it is written with passion, experience, anger, wisdom and, thankfully, a good bit of humor. Hitchens is not above hyperbole; in some ways the scope of the book welcomes misquotes and, occasionally, stereotype. However, he distributes his scathing, common sense critiques across all belief systems and he provides a deep, welcome breadth of first hand experience in cultures and climates very different from those I am familiar with.

Personally, I have long attempted a well balanced world view that succumbed neither to Nihilism nor Fundamentalism but rather walked down the lonely road of the critical thinker. Today, I am further down that road than ever.