I’m no fan of Christo­pher Hitchens. Actu­al­ly, I find him an almost entire­ly dis­agree­able fig­ure. But I have to give him points for cre­ativ­i­ty. Inter­viewed last week (MP3 — iTunes — Feed), Hitchens, the author of the recent best­seller God Is Not Great, gave his spiel on athe­ism and offered a unique argu­ment against God. Not against God’s exis­tence. But against God itself.

For Hitchens, if there exist­ed a God who answered prayers and inter­vened in human affairs, “we would be liv­ing under an unal­ter­able celes­tial dic­ta­tor­ship that could read our thoughts while we were asleep and con­vict us of thought crime and pur­sue us after we after are dead, and in the name of which priest­hoods and oth­er oli­garchies and hier­ar­chies would be set up to enforce God’s law.” Essen­tial­ly, we’d be liv­ing in a super­nat­ur­al Orwellian world.

In a quick cou­ple sen­tences, the the­o­ret­i­cal virtues of an all-know­ing God get turned into a vice. It’s a cre­ative and provoca­tive remark, just the kind that sells books in Amer­i­ca. Many, many books, in fact.

This bit appears about 41 min­utes into his inter­view. Dur­ing the rest of the con­ver­sa­tion, Hitchens con­tin­ues jus­ti­fy­ing his sup­port for the Iraq war and offers his thoughts on who killed Benazir Bhut­to. If you want more Hitchens, and if you want to hear Hitchens behav­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly bad­ly, you can always lis­ten to this oth­er inter­view from last year.

And don’t for­get to check out our large col­lec­tion of Ideas & Cul­ture Pod­casts.