PZ Myers reports on his experiences at the Freedom From Religion Convention, including a lengthy description of Christopher Hitchens’s talk, where Hitchens apparently goes of the deep end and gives full rein to his revenge fantasies against Muslims.

Great. With Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, we get two prominent and articulate spokespeople for godlessness who responded to 9/11 with bigotry against Muslims. Hell, that’s half the public face of atheism in English-speaking circles, these days. Both seem incapable of distinguishing between fanatics and ordinary boring Muslims, both like to whip up quasi-nationalist panic under the name of Enlightenment values, and both make pronouncements with the invincible confidence born of ignorance of what they so readily demonize.

It’s hard to avoid the thought that Harris and Hitchens endorse the kind of violence implict in a war against Islam. This is, it seems, a war they would really like, though they do their cheerleading under the guise of asking us to wake up to a war that Muslims have already started. I wonder how they get away with this, especially since an important element of their polemic against religion is the charge that faith is irredemeably mixed up with violence.