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Christopher Hitchens' new book, 'God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything' , dismisses all faith as "wish-thinking". The vitriolic and evangelical atheist, who admits to celebrating Passover, answers your questions in the Online Faith Forum.

Alongside the 'problem of evil' is the problem of good - what about all the people whose faith has inspired them to change society for the better? David Keen, Yeovil.

I have a challenge that I have issued in America which I’ll put to you. You have to come up with a moral statement made, or a moral action performed by a believer or a person of faith, that could not have been uttered by an unbeliever. I haven’t so far had anyone come up with an answer to this and I’m genuinely interested to see if they can. My point is therefore that religion is optional and if you say, “Well I think we should free the slaves because Jesus wants it”, I think it is a fatuous thing to say but it is not a wrong thing to say. It ought to be enough to say “I think we should free the slaves.” There is no scriptural authority of any kind for freeing the slaves, none, but there’s a good deal of scriptural warrant for slavery, which is why it lasted as long as it did and why it persists, especially in the Muslim world. Because it is indeed warranted by the text, which emancipation is not. It is a very important question. In my book there is a good deal of material about the conditions under which Jews can have slaves and what they are allowed to do to them. A lot of it is in Leviticus and Exodus, I believe.

Do not call me a fundamentalist

I believe that people will courageously cast aside their celestial comfort blankets, says Richard Dawkins

Rees-Mogg v Dawkins

William Rees-Mogg, The Times columnist, joins the debate about faith in a reply to Professor Richard Dawkins

BACKGROUND

• Everyone should read the Bible, says Dawkins

• Man v God

• Christopher Hitchens answers your questions on God, life, and the Universe

• Why religion poisons everything

Related Internet Links

• God is not great - the case against religion

• God....in other words

• Dawkins v God -stop the fight

What would you say about St. Paul's statement in the Letter to the Galatians that "it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm. then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery"? It seems to me that this verse explains a lot of your own life and your life's passions. How do you know you're not a Christian? Mary Ailes

I do not recognise myself in that exerpt from the Galations at all.

I’m irritated by people who ask questions like this, who say if one takes an interest in a subject like this that it’s a disguised form of seeking or even faith. I think that is plainly nonsense. The more I know about it, particularly the more I know about Christianity, the more contemptible I find it, and I’m quite sure that it’s not a repressed love affair – I know what that’s like and it’s nothing like this. It’s not love/hate with religion, it’s hate/hate.

I believe there is a God, but there is also a Devil. Jesus had to deal with this (in the wilderness for instance). Do you believe in nothing or nothing and the Devil? Irene Scaife, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

I recommend you read Jim Crace’s novel ‘Quarantine’. It is a wonderful novel about the 40 days and 40 nights; I recommend to everyone they read it. I have sometimes thought that if you were going to use the design argument, which many people do to argue that there’s a creator - in other words, if you were going to infer somebody from his apparent actions - then it would be a lot easier to infer a devil than it would to infer a benign creator.

I’m not just being funny about that; it would be easier, but it’s still impossible to infer anything from design.

Although I find that I can’t get by without using the word “evil”, and though I couldn’t prove it I do myself think of evil as a real thing, a real force, I think it’s childish to personify these things. I think, fortunately for us, we have an innate morality. We don’t get it from religion; religion borrows it from us and fashions it into other kinds of code. But, yes, we do have a knowledge of the right thing and how to perform it and it’s a very interesting speculation as to quite where that comes from, but it doesn’t come from God. Those who say that it does have the question returned to them, which is: “Must he not be responsible for evil as well?” Since they can’t answer that question comfortably they have to invent a whole supernatural being, which is nonsense.

Was Mrs Watts's comment really that significant? Were you not just a precocious little child? [Mrs Watts was Mr Hitchens' school teacher who told him, aged nine, “So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes." Young Hitchens was "appalled" by this] Martin East