THE anti-religion case has never been put so well, so comprehensively or so definitively as in Christopher Hitchens' razorsharp examination of the claims, character and record of religion.

Furthermore, much has been added to the case here from the joint resources of Hitchens' wide firsthand acquaintance with the personalities and effects of religion in our tumultuous world, his formidable range of reference and his sheer acuity of intelligence.

A common charge levelled by defenders of faiths against their critics is that the latter do not understand the enticements of religion from within. As in so many other ways, they meet their match here. Hitchens was brought up a Christian in a family of partly Jewish extraction and well understands the throat-catching beauty of language in the King James version of the bible, the moral stature of such figures as Martin Luther King and the point of Marx's analysis of the role played by religion in the lives of the oppressed. But none of these things disguises, less excuses, the false and often wicked pretensions of religion as it infects history and the present . . . and here they are addressed one by one.

Hitchens begins by demolishing the metaphysical claim that the universe contains any supernatural agency or agencies, for once this is done and religions are seen for what they are . . . namely manmade constructions whose original point was to supply the ignorance of mankind's pre-scientific infancy . . . their many falsehoods and dangers can be exposed. With steely assurance salted with wit, Hitchens proceeds to do so, devastatingly and inexorably.

He shows that religion's foundational documents are transparent fabrications and that its limited usefulness lies well in the past, since when it has been a persistent balk to science and enquiry and an enemy to freedom of speech and thought, as well as to individual liberty. He shows it sustains itself on lies and fears and has not only been the promoter of ignorance, guilt, sexual repression, torture, murder, hatred and violent fanaticism but the accomplice of slavery, genocide, racism and tyranny.

None of these charges is deniable and some of the main bureaucracies of religion have admitted the fact: witness the 'apologies' issued by the last pope for the manifold sins and wickednesses of the church throughout its history. In light of the remark that "by their fruits ye shall know them" this is most telling.

Hitchens relentlessly exposes those turpitudes and scarcely need answer the putative counterargument that says there would be no great works of art and architecture without religion. Of course there would: they are the product of humanity's creative urge and any excuse would evoke them. (In any case: is the apologist's claim that witchhunts, child-molestation, wars and mass exterminations are a fair price for plainsong, cathedrals and endlessly iterated paintings of the Madonna? ) Hitchens also answers the weary canard that the secular tyrannies of fascism and communism have as bad a record as religion. One way of countering it is to observe that Torquemada's Catholicism, Talibanism, Nazism and Stalinism all share the same character: they are monolithic ideologies that coerce subservience to an ideal identified by those in power and even display such similarities as enforced credos, thought-crime and saints embalmed in mausoleums. Hitchens uses their comparable totalitarian structure to articulate the point.

He notes the similarity of outward forms, adding the details that apologists like to forget . . . eg Hitler's religious sentiments, Stalin's education in a seminary . . . and reminds us that absolute monarchy was underpinned by the doctrine of the divine right of kings.

How did the religions respond to the 20th century's secular tyrannies, given their "own record of succumbing to, and promulgating, dictatorships on earth and absolute control in the life to come"? as Hitchens pointedly asks. Well, Pope Pius XI described Mussolini as "a man sent by providence"; a 1930s slogan of the Catholic right in France was "meilleur Hitler que Blum"; almost all German Catholics agreed with the tenor of this sentiment as applied to their own country; and so one could go dispiritedly on.

Hitchens is not one to mince words but his book is not a rant, any more than a report of the crimes of the Inquisition or Pol Pot would be as a rant. He accumulates a devastating case and only the blindest refusal to concede to reason could allow a defender of religion to come away from his book without big questions to answer.

Hitchens ends by calling for a "new Enlightenment", premised on the idea that the proper study of mankind is man and woman.

The unfettered pursuit of science, the study of literature and poetry, and a generous attitude to relations between people is the true basis for achievement of the good . . .and it is within the reach of humankind for the first time ever.

Not, he concedes, that achieving it will be easy: but it is possible.