This is one of the big ones, of course, and if there was a straightforward or easy answer someone -- Irenaeus, Aquinas, whoever -- would have come up with it. The problem is contained in the assumptions in the question: 'a good God' and the like. We are never, repeat never, in a position where we can size up God and decide what such a being ought really to do. A lot of people today assume, vaguely, that God ought to be running things, stopping earthquakes, preventing road accidents, whatever. They seldom stop to imagine what their own world might be like if God really stepped in every time we were about to do something wrong.

The Bible doesn't pose, or answer, the question that way. It tells a long, complex narrative about a plan launched by the creator God to heal creation. This plan, begun with the call of Abraham, reaches its climax in Jesus and his horrific death, and works out from there, not to the rescue of souls from a doomed world, but to the healing and renewal of the whole creation. That is the framework within which we may be able not indeed to answer the question as posed (which is actually a very post-Enlightenment way of putting it: see Susan Neiman's brilliant book, "Evil in Modern Thought"), but to grapple with the actual world in which evil remains so powerful yet Jesus and his followers declare that the creator God is becoming king.

On all this (sorry for the plug) see my book "Evil and the Justice of God."

It would be nice to have a clear sound-bite for this one, but I'm afraid the question needs a bit of redefining.

The phrase 'religious extremists' has come to mean (a) Muslim terrorists and (b) (in some quarters at least) Christian fundamentalists. But of course many Christians (like myself) who aren't fundamentalists believe that fundamentalism is a bizarre, distorted form of Christianity and 'our' form is (at least) a more authentic one.

In other words, lots (most?) of us believe ourselves to be the 'right' type of Christian -- so perhaps, in that sense, we too are 'religious extremists', even if the 'extreme' to which we go is that of a more reasoned, thought-out, and (hopefully) biblically faithful and socially responsible kind of thing.

I suppose all this is saying that the phrase 'religious extremists' is a way of liberal society doing with people it disapproves of more or less the equivalent of what they are doing to us, that is, labeling us in such a way that will then justify writing us off, whether with rhetoric or with bombs.

Of course, this doesn't justify what they do; to understand the complexities of a question isn't the same as excusing dehumanizing behavior of whatever sort. It is a way of saying, what I wish we could say to terrorists and others: Look, we take our religion seriously too, and it leads us to different conclusions from you. We might be wrong; so might you; but in the name of whichever god you invoke, would it not be a better thing for us all to talk together about the issues at the heart of our respective faiths than to try to achieve dominance by violence?

Unfortunately, they could quite well come back at us and say, 'You mean, like you westerners have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last five years?'

The trouble is the word 'religion'. This is an eighteenth-century western category -- divorced at that stage from the rest of real life in a way it had never been before -- and bears little relation to any isolated reality that societies before then, or indeed most people in today's wide world, would recognize. For most of history, and for most people today, what the west currently calls 'religion' is woven tightly in with home and family, politics and government, music and art and a thousand other things.

What's more, few people prior to the eighteenth century would have doubted that 'religion' in general could be allied with the behavior patterns which Hitchens describes. Most people, in fact, would have said 'but that's simply normal human behavior, however regrettable'. The proof of the pudding is that, with the last two centuries in our mind, we could substitute the word 'atheism' for 'religion' in Hitchens' quote and it would still work (think: French Revolution, Gulag, etc etc).

The question might then be put: granted that 'religion' is now a fairly useless category, and that indeed much mainstream Christianity has been deeply suspicious of 'religion' as such precisely because it doesn't seem to have the life-changing property it's supposed to, is there another dimension, another depth, which is life-changing, peace-loving, and so on? The New Testament insists that there is . . . granted of course that a great many who claim to follow it collapse back into 'ordinary religion' given half a chance . . .