Do you see yourself as an atheist leader, akin to a religious leader?
Actually, part of the treasure of being an atheist is that you don’t have to go to any positive-reinforcement ceremony—which, if you’re a believer, you keep getting together with other people and reminding yourself of what you supposedly believe. Always, I thought, a sign of insecurity. We don’t need to do that.

You come down hard on Islam. How do you get along with your Muslim friends at cocktail parties?
Most of my friends are those that have repudiated their religion. It is more true of the Muslims I know, because there is more of a crisis in Islam than there is in Judaism or Christianity, in my opinion. The problem is that some of this violence within Islam is being exported into other societies. At the moment, it’s much more dangerous. If it were 60 years ago, I probably would be writing more against the Catholic Church. 

Is that violence simply because of religion or could you blame it on, say, poverty?
You can blame it on the fact that we are primates as well. It doesn’t take much for people to become violent, but just see what people feel they are permitted to do when they do believe in God. They will do things the morally agnostic or atheist would never contemplate doing, such as mutilating the genitals of your children, for example, or borrowing a jet full of human beings and smashing it into a skyscraper full of human beings.

You inspired a U.S. soldier to fight in Iraq; when he died there, you said, “I wanted to accept the compliment.” Would you consider yourself indifferent to human life?
Certainly not. I didn’t think that was an insensitive thing to say. [Stories like that] wouldn’t be in [my] book if it was an account of how compassionate I could be to please you. Everything in the book is there for one purpose alone: to satirize or ridicule or discredit religion. It’s not designed to make me look like a sensitive person. Sorry to disappoint you there.

You’re a left-wing supporter of the Iraq War. Is that lonely these days?
Fairly, not terribly. There are a lot of people, a lot of Iraqis like that. If that isn’t important to the American left, then they don’t care what happens to their comrades in another country. That would pretty much demonstrate what’s wrong with the American left. The left position is essentially the United States doesn’t have the right to act overseas.

Your Spertus lecture has the inflammatory title “Do Jews have an atheist gene?” Do you try to be provocative?
No, but a great effort not to be boring. I mean, if [people] find things like that provocative or inflammatory, then I think they are easily provoked or inflamed. One doesn’t want to be rude and say, “So what?” but that is obviously what I feel. [Your question] is just the implication that I should care or indeed, even more, the implication that I should avoid anything that might upset some people.

What does your Jewish wife think?
Carol doesn’t see why anyone cares about this; she thinks it’s so obvious that it is all nonsense.

No fighting then?
[Laughs] There is no nothing! Only that it is self-evident that there is no God and it’s a man-made delusion. And I say, “Don’t you care about proving it?” And she says, “Not really, no.”

Hitchens keeps the faith at the Spertus on Monday 12.