People don’t think anymore. Not much, anyway. Oh, sure, we like to think we’re thinking, but that’s just so we can say we exist (thanks, Rene!). Mostly what we consider to be thought are flashes in our brain pan — we may think of, and we may think for, and sometimes we may even think up, yet seldom do we ever think out or think through.

Think about it.

Christopher Hitchens, on the other hand, never met a thought he didn’t think worth thinking more about. He thinks through (even if sometimes we can see through his thinking), he thinks out (though occasionally we think him out of his mind) and he thinks out loud (and unabashedly proud). In fact, the man’s made a very handsome career out of his skull’s rattling, which, thankfully, tends to come off more like a saber in search of a duel than the mere prattle of a baby’s toy.

In God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, $24.99), Hitchens’ blade not only finds a fight it can relish, it is wielded with flourish.

And, yes, it hits its mark — sharply, deeply and with much volume and fanfare. After all, this is Hitchens, named one of the world’s Hot 100 Public Intellectuals by both Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect magazines, the man who most infamously feuded with Noam Chomsky (and lost his slot at The Nation as a result), and most recently fought it out against the irreverent Rev. Al Sharpton (and re-won over thousands upon thousands of heart-sleeved minds).

Hitchens’ argument — if one can even call it that — is that belief has poisoned humanity’s well-spring, with madness and with prejudice; that goodness is inherent, not a mandate; and we don’t need no stinkin’ higher power to tell us how to live.

It is not a new position for Hitchens, who’s long been noted as an atheist and an anti-theist, nor is this the first time he’s entered such sharky waters.

Many might recall that he courageously came out against Mother Theresa, a stance that provoked the bean-brained Brent Bozell to group him among the world’s “notoriously vicious anti-Catholics.” Of course Hitchens was anti-Catholic; he’s anti-theist, of every stripe.

His tackling of Theresa was a natural byproduct of a rigorous thought process that began with an article entitled “The Ghoul of Calcutta,” continued on with the Channel 4 doc Hell’s Angel, became bound in The Missionary Position and fledged fully when Hitchens was called on by the Vatican to play the role of Devil’s Advocate in her beatification process. He had many points to make (her fundamentalist stance on contraception and abortion, the spread of convents rather than teaching hospitals, her affiliation with the likes of Charles Keating, her “acceptance” of poverty), and he made them pointedly.

Alas, dear Hitch’s diatribe didn’t prevent John Paul II from further Blessing the Sister; it did, however, predate the undoing of much of the nun’s reputation.

But don’t think for a second that Hitchens is afraid to pick on someone his own size, living or dead — the L.A Times recently noted that Hitchens considered Mahatma Gandhi “an obscurantist,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a plagiarist, as well as an orgiast, and the Dalai Lama nothing but “a medieval princeling.”

With such an exalted enemies list, it only stands to good reason that the man would take on God.

Still, to be unfair, if God weren’t written by Hitchens it might not even be on the discussion block, let alone be lauded and lambasted, often in the same single-minded breath. Of late there’s been a fusillade of books making a case against a Creator — most notably, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, to name but two — and, whatever their merits, they and their ilk remain simply and unequivocally a part of a certain zeitgeist, holes poked into an already much-battered corpse.

Hitchens, to his credit, has been hollowing His name for years, in book, in byline and in person; don’t you think it’s time we all took in the air?

Presented in collaboration with Temple Judea, Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College and the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Florida International University, Christopher Hitchens appears in a Town Hall discussion moderated by Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg of Temple Judea, with comments from Nathan Katz, Ph.D., director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at FIU; Aisha Y. Musa, Ph.D., assistant professor of Islamic Studies, FIU; Lama Karma Chotso, Buddhist nun; and Daniel Alvarez, instructor of Religious Studies, FIU. The event takes place 7:30 p.m. today, May 17, at Temple Judea, 5500 Granada Blvd., Coral Gables. Free tickets are available at all Books & Books locations or at the door at the event, starting at 7 p.m., while supplies last. Call 305-442-4408.

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com. Hood is online at www.therealjohnhood.com.