Over at Slate, Hitchens touts the Enlightenment line with great dexterity. One gets the impression that he actually believes he's saying something that hasn't been preached by moderns for the past four hundred years.

That religion is no more than a projection of man's wish to be a slave and a fool and of his related fear of too much knowledge or too much freedom. Well, we didn't even need Hobbes (who wanted to replace a divine with a man-made dictator) to tell us that. To regret that we cannot be done with superstition is no more than to regret that we have a common ancestry with apes and plants and fish. But millimetrical progress has been made even so, and it is measurable precisely to the degree that we cease to believe ourselves the objects of a divine (and here's the totalitarian element again) "plan." Shaking off the fantastic illusion that we are the objective of the Big Bang or the process of evolution is something that any educated human can now do.

I really wonder whether Hitchens truly believes it is possible to escape authority (divine or totalitarian). Perhaps he'd like to see a non-personal ultimate authority -- "Reason" (an ideal which Marsilius, Bacon, Descartes, and other dead white men thought they had invented).