Kathryn, surely we should primarily criticize Hitchens for failures in logic, not failures of religious belief, even if we might disagree with the latter.
Turning to the question of obsession, Mark, I do think that the drift of your earlier comments (and I apologize if I misunderstood you) was that there was something obsessive about Hitchens’s distaste for the idea of God. My point was, and is, that his ‘diatribes’ (to use Kathryn’s word) are no more than the equivalent of the preaching of a pious, but rather over-enthusiastic, believer, enlightening to those who have ears to hear, grating to everyone else. For what it’s worth, I’ve always considered that atheism is, in essence, a religion. Huckabee and Hitchens are, so to speak, just different sides of the same coin. Who knew?