That God Thing.

I finished D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity? several days ago, so I'm now reading Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

I love both these guys. On the whole, I think Hitchens may be the better thinker, but on this topic he has it wrong—D'Souza gets it right. Of course, the two men had slightly different missions. Hitchens wrote a polemic against all religions, which is, I believe, easier to pull off. After all, no faith is devoid of its superstitious moments, and with the world awash in radical Islam right now, it's easy to point out that "religion" has poisoned quite a lot. D'Souza chose the harder task by focusing on one faith—his very own—and writing a spirited defense of it and its place in the intellectual tradition that brought us good things like science, the American Revolution, and dark beer.

Of course, D'Souza isn't carrying socialism around with him everywhere he goes, so in general he probably has it easier. (He has other ridiculous ideas lodged in his cranium instead.)

It's sure a pleasure to read both of these guys. In an interesting way, they make nice companion pieces to Jonathan Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors. In addition to having coined the term "apatheistic" (to which D'Souza makes one or two snide allusions in passing; sigh), Rauch provides a nice history of the framework of free inquiry that we need to preserve, above all else, if Western traditions are going to endure.

Rauch makes the very best case as to why we might not want to spend a lot of time squabbling over religion, for what that is worth.

Even Hitchens claims that all he really wants his religious friends to do is to "leave him alone," and stop confusing his politeness on matters of faith with openness to witness. Both Hitchens and Rauch were clearly shaken—as they had every freaking reason to be—by the fatwa against Salmon Rushdie, and the ghost of that event flits across the pages of both Not Great and Kindly Inquisitors.

When I went to see Salmon Rushdie speak at a book fair one year I had a few pangs of fear. I knew we'd probably have to pass through metal detectors, but I wasn't sure whether or not the building we were in might somehow be detonated from outside. And I was also acutely aware that the fear I was feeling that afternoon was a part of Rushdie's existence 365 days a year, merely because he wrote a silly little piece of religious satire some time back.

"Aw, what the hell," I told my friends. "We have to die from something." And we headed down the hill to hear the man out.

Religion isn't invariably toxic. But, used incorrectly, it can certainly cause a lot of damage. Just like love, which Joni Mitchell once called "the strongest posion and medicine of all."

The problem lies with human nature. Whether this has to do with overdeveloped adrenal glands, as Hitchen maintains, or original sin is not altogether clear to me. But I know it doesn't quite work.

So: people of faith, agnostics, and athiests—let's be careful out there. Be kind to your fellow humans. Promote public inquiry and criticism. And, you know: try not to kill anybody in the name of God.