Mammals of the world unite! God is a fetid teddy bear we’ve hugged to our chests for far too long, and religion is an elaborate fraud feeding the illusion that one never dies. It’s the stagnant well from which springs grief, stupidity, perversion, repression and savagery—an obstacle to the continued advancement of civilization. Or so proclaims journalist and fire-breathing controversialist Christopher Hitchens.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything—currently sitting atop the New York Times’ non-fiction best-seller list—is the Vanity Fair columnist’s fierce non serviam. A scornful assault on the authority of divine revelation and the attendant crimes of idol worship, it’s the grand peroration to a personal dispute with religious dogma that began nearly five decades ago, when a sandal-shod, short-pant-clad nine-year-old Hitch (spend a moment conjuring that image) first cringed his way through “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

Here, the pedigreed provocateur shares his thoughts on what it means to be a mammal, the intellectual failings of the believer, and the troubling proclivities of Scottish shepherds.

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You claim you’ve been writing this book all your life. What compelled you to complete and publish it now?

A friend wrote to me the other day and attached an interview I’d given some years ago, in which I was asked, given my atheism, whether I’d ever want to write a book about it, and I said, “Probably not, no. The case has been made so well for so long there isn’t really need for another book about it.”

If I ask myself why my mind changed, which it must have done, it would be because of two things. The first was the attempted murder of my friend Salman Rushdie in 1989—the public offer of money by a religious leader for his murder and the general refusal of religious forces to criticize that or to stand up to it. So February 14, 1989 is my hinge day in some ways, more than September 11, 2001, which is a big day for a lot of other people. But that certainly seemed to me to confirm what I was afraid of: that the age of religious warfare or warfare between religion and the Enlightenment was back. And that it was going to probably last for the rest of my life.

You frequently refer to human beings as “mammals.” What’s the significance of this designation? Is this a reduction, reclamation or a bit of both?

It’s both. I’ve just had my DNA analyzed and my history sequenced. The National Geographic Genographic Project will show you which bit of Africa you came from and then the arrows show you were you went—in my case, around the corner into the Middle East, into Europe and then over to England. In various ways, one is shown that racism is a construct and always was. There’s no such thing. A racist now is someone who believes in such a thing as race.

And I also think that the unravelling or sequencing, if that’s the right word, of the human genome, showing how much we have in common in our DNA with other species and indeed with plants, is not at all depressing. To me it’s rather marvellous and rather moving. But I think it means that we are even less entitled than some religious people think we are to regard ourselves as the objects of a divine plan or design.

In your view, why does something so false, absurd and amoral continue to compel so many? What is religion’s sustaining power?

We are only a partly rational species. We aren’t that brilliantly evolved. We’ve got a lot of things from the savannah—an environment that we’ve abandoned—including fear, fight or flight, predatory instincts and something (as far as we know) that most animals do not have, which is consciousness of death, not to say “fear” of it. Now religion offers you a sort of wager whereby, in return for certain observances and conditions, you can be brought to believe—apparently some people can be—that an exception will be made in your case. An offer like that is going to get some takers every time. And it conforms perfectly to wishful thinking. Which is one of our great vices, perhaps our greatest.

Sometimes you address a reader in the book. Did you have an intended reader?

Yes, I had two, and it probably shows. I wanted to hearten the forces of secularism and try to get them to mobilize a bit and to fight back, which the book has had some success in doing. And then I wanted it to engage with people who claim to have faith and see if I couldn’t help them get rid of it.

Do you think your tone helps or hinders when it comes to fulfilling that second intention?

No idea. It’s not something I could vary in any case. The singer and the song are the same thing. I can’t tell who hasn’t liked it. But I’ve had a lot of people tell me that it has had the effect of shaking their faith. On the radio just yesterday, someone said he’d dumped it entirely after reading the book. You don’t often get that.

Is that a good thing?

Not really. Because someone who could do it that quickly may recover it just as fast. It’s more how you think than what you think that’s important. There is a zeitgeist change going on. Everywhere I’ve gone with this book there have been enormous crowds and, of course, it went straight to the top of the best-seller list before it had barely been published. This is not because of my blue eyes—or my sexual charisma.

Though that is powerful. I watched your recent debate with Reverend Al Sharpton on YouTube—

Ugh. Described as a civil rights activist in the New York Times today. Disgraceful.