Normally, Mr. Hitchens, I would disagree with you—at least with your tone in how you go at religion. Your approach is reductionist in ways that don’t entirely add up, given the good I know that religion does in the world, often in the smallest, most hidden ways, and given the good people I know who find in faith a beautiful, intellectual, satisfying, and giving life.

Of course, then, there are the truths you speak. We are all well aware of how the institution that is religion, not to mention its rogue off-shoots, wreaks havoc in our world and has left such tragedy in its wake. But again, this is only part of religion’s story. I worry when a person simply refuses to concede that religions—regardless of all their flaws—help most believers walk life’s finest of lines—between good and evil, between beauty and brutality, between utter joy and meaning and the deepest pain and despair. To deny this altogether is its own sort of fundamentalism.