Religious Read
THEY don't call him Christopher "Hellbound" Hitchens for nothing. The heretic who attacked Mother Teresa in "Missionary Position" is at it again with "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," hitting bookstores next month.
The jeremiad, reports The Post's Kyle Smith, is a merciless attack on every faith - dryly called "ecumenical" by its editor, Jonathan Karp, who is making it the second title in his new imprint, named 12 because it publishes only one book a month.
"Religion has retarded the development of civilization," writes Hitchens, who calls Saint Augustine "a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus" and Mel Gibson "a fascist and ham actor [who] adheres to a crackpot and schismatic sect, and has stated that it is a pity that his own dear wife is going to hell because she does not accept the correct sacraments."
But the Hitch is just getting warmed up.
* On God: " 'God is in the details?' He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure and incompetence."
* On the Koran: "I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come."
* On Islam: "A mask for a very deep and probably justifiable insecurity . . . not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance."
* On creationism and intelligent design: "The inculcation of compulsory stupidity."
* On Gandhi: "A fakir and guru" whose belief in primitive farm-based living meant that "millions of people would have starved to death if his advice had been followed."
* On Billy Graham: "His absurd [post-9/11] sermon made the claim that all the dead were now in paradise and would not return to us even if they could."
* On the Dalai Lama: "A hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient!"
* On Moses: "Commandingly authoritarian and bloody-minded" and given to "genocidal incitements."
Hitchens, who says he was once mistaken for the god "Sai Baba" in Sri Lanka, writes, "If I am hit by a bus on the day this book is published, there will certainly be people who will say it was no accident."