Hitchens answers a common question of believers:
Q: Why do so many people believe? Are they just stupid? (a thoughtful answer)
His answer is respectful and accurate, and as usual, pointed.
Religion was our first try at cognition; our first try at epistemology, our first try at philosophy, in some ways our first try at mathematics. It's what we came up with because we are pattern-seeking and ambitious and freedom-seeking mammals, when we didn't know we lived on a spherical earth, we didn't know we were in circulation around other heavenly bodies, we didn't know about gravity, we didn't know that there were microorganisms that were stronger that ourselves that explained a lot.
We didn’t know why the heavens darkened and rain and hail fell. We didn’t know why there were earthquakes, floods. It was our first tremulous attempt to make sense. And in the work of Aquinas and Austine and elsewhere we see our first glimmerings of our attempts at philosopy. And in the [cromwell] prayer book and in the King James version of the bible, and in the English hymnal, we also have the beginnings of literature. For the first time, everyone who could read, had read one book, and had a common discourse.
So …it’s a very important, and honorable and at best, even a noble subject, but of course it is man made and a delusion.
And it is used by wicked people to exploit the credulousness of innocent people, to create not an eternal life or life of freedom in another world, but a real, actual, material, secular dictatorship now claimed by people who have the arrogance to say that they themselves are acting in the name of god.
And that’s why it has to be opposed.