For all of the claims that Christopher Hitchens has abandoned his earlier Leftist proclivities, there is at least one point at which he remains an orthodox Marxist. His recent book, God is not Great, is a straightforward reiteration of Marx’s own critique of religion, albeit in the most splendidly bombastic fashion.
"God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilisation … Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made."
Hitchens here evokes one of philosophy’s most defiant veins: the reduction of the religious impulse to the product of our basest human instincts. He thus places himself within an intellectual tradition that stretches from Kant ("we cannot conceive God otherwise than by attributing to him without limit all the real qualities which we find in ourselves") through Feuerbach ("man — this is the mystery of religion — projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself"), until it finally reaches Marx himself ("the foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man").
But, as one might expect, Hitchens gives this tradition his own contemptuous twist. He is not content just to strip religion of its nobility, to dislodge it from its pride of place as the founding gesture of civilisation — the moment when Homo sapiens, driven by its emerging thirst for transcendence, takes the first step out of the domain of primates by investing certain ritualised practices with meaning.
He goes further, and dismisses religion as little more than the invention of hucksters and frauds who, at every occasion, aim to exploit our innate fears and profit from our listless servitude. Here, again, Hitchens invokes Marx’s authority, citing his famous anti-Darwinian quip that "human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape" (though he misattributes it to Engels).
His point is that, even as the later manifestations of a process disclose the true nature of its origin, so too the most notorious historical examples of religious fabrication and plagiarism — from Muhammadism and Mormonism to the preposterous ‘cargo cults’ of Melanesia —