These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.” He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. And now there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (Twelve $24.99), by Christopher Hitchens, which is both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot. Harris joined battle again last year with “Letter to a Christian Nation,” which renewed his attack on Christianity in particular. Next was “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and Britain’s preëminent science writer. Then came “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, who has written popular books on the science of consciousness and on Darwin. The first of these books was “The End of Faith,” by Sam Harris, which was published in 2004 and was on the Times paperback best-seller list for thirty-three weeks. The terrorist attacks were carried out in the name of Islam, and they have been taken, by a string of best-selling books, to illustrate the fatal dangers of all religious faith. But September 11th and its aftershocks in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere are more notable for causing an outbreak of militant atheism, at least on bookshelves. Two populist preachers, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, called it divine punishment (though both quickly withdrew their remarks), and not only the bereaved prayed for help. The felling of the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, brought its share of religion. From the eighteenth century onward, no respectable intellectual saw comets as direct messages from God-though there were still some fears that one might eventually hit the earth. In the next few years, as Armageddon somehow failed to arrive, a stream of pamphlets across Europe and America argued that heavenly displays were purely natural phenomena. But the comet also sparked a small triumph for rationalism. On December 2nd, it made an extraordinarily loud cackle and produced an exceptionally large egg, on which could be seen a likeness of the comet, or so it was said. A hen in Rome seemed to confirm that the Day of Judgment was near. When an unusually bright and long-tailed comet was tracked through the sky in the last two months of 1680, posters and sermons called on Christians to repent.

Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him. In the second century A.D., it was the Christians who were denounced as “atheists.” JONATHAN BOROFSKY, “FOUR GODS” (1994)

Author of god is not great