When, in October 2009, Christopher Hitchens explained to a Sydney crowd how religion poisoned everything, he opened with a little joke.

He'd been delighted, he said, to discover his hotel situated in a locale where, if you took an evening constitutional, you could, without fear of embarrassment, ask a passerby, 'Am I heading for The Rocks?' The question had often previously occurred to him — but in Sydney, at least, the answer involved directions.

That was the first of several references to Hitchens' legendary thirst during a lecture advertised with its speaker, cigarette in mouth, glaring belligerently from posters like a drunk at closing time. Even with laughter still rippling around the hall, I found myself wondering why, in a talk about God, it should matter so very much that the audience knew that, yes, Hitchens really did like a drink.

But it was only later, after host Tony Jones insisted our lecturer recite — twice — Monty Python's drunken philosopher's song, that I thought I understood. Hitchens was opening an event calling itself the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. At some level, the organisers sensed that, insofar as the evening featured only a middle-aged Oxbridge-educated intellectual — indeed, one who'd recently been profiled in Vanity Fair, boasting, like every other tiresome baby boomer, about quitting smoking and embracing exercise — we might struggle to believe that much risk lay in an utterly conventional denunciation of a deity in whom scarcely any of us believed. The arguments against God are, after all, sufficiently well established: as long ago as 1842, Marx was comparing atheists who brayed about their intellectual courage to 'children assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogey man'. How, then, might a self-styled contrarian provide the frisson required for an evening of danger? The more, perhaps, he hinted at whisky-soaked debaucheries ('without God, all things are permitted'), the easier for us to persuade ourselves that we were all tremendously daring simply for listening.

Yet in 2010, when a celebrity non-believer fulminates in the broadsheets, at a writers week or on the ABC, they're staging, more often than not, a confrontation not with those listening but rather with those who aren't, a challenge issued not so much to our beliefs but to theirs, to doctrines, in other words, accepted by the kinds of Australians who don't come to the Opera House. Precisely because contemporary religion flourishes at the cultural margins (in the outer suburbs, for instance, or among immigrant communities) rather than amid the taste-setters and intellectuals, most New Atheist presentations contain more than a pinch of bien-pensant snobbery, so that the genteel crowd at a professorial demolition of some scriptural daftness or another leaves smugly satisfied with their superiority over those oiks for whom biblical fairytales still have meaning.

At the global rather than national level, the tendency becomes both more pronounced and more pernicious. If religion consists simply of a risible set of falsifiable and ethically wrong-headed propositions, then its adherents are, almost by definition, stupid and dangerous — and the more ardently they cling to their delusions, the more their stupidity and dangerousness grows. Furthermore, there are certain nations where, in these terms, the population seems very deluded indeed — and, wouldn't you know it, many of them can be found in the Middle East. So if the wild-eyed fanatics chanting Allah akhbar were to be confronted by the pointy end of Western rationality, well, would that be so very terrible?

Certainly, Sam Harris doesn't think so. In Australia, Harris might not be a name with which to conjure but in the United States he's one of atheism's big three, part of an unholy trinity with Richard Dawkins and Hitchens. His breakthrough book The End of Faith begins as a general critique of God but morphs very quickly into a crass apologia for the war on terror and, precisely because Harris lacks Hitchens' political sophistication, his argument repays closer examination, since it illustrates quite openly some of the implications of the New Atheist methodology.

Harris, of course, excels at exposures of the contradictions and cruelties contained in the various sacred texts. He quotes, for instance, Deuteronomy on what believers should do if a family member proposes worshipping a different god:

Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone him to death, because he tried to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

As Harris says, this — and the many similar passages in which the God of Love casually commends rapine and murder — goes a long way towards puncturing assertions that religion necessarily provides a basis for morality. But what follows from that?

In reply to objections that only a loopy fringe worries about the wilder reaches of the Old Testament, Harris argues that moderation in religion is scarcely less dangerous than fundamentalism, since the moderate retains, simply by accepting an unprovable God, the anti-rational methodology of the literalist.

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence … The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivalled.

Yet for Harris, all religions might be bad but some are much worse than others — and there's no prize for guessing which particular faith falls into the latter category. 'We are', he explains, 'at war with Islam' since 'Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.'

Do those of the Islamic faith have any genuine reasons for looking upon the United States in a less than favourable light? Apparently not: Harris, inevitably, quotes Paul Berman to explain how 'in all of recent history, no country on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States on behalf of Muslim populations', while to explain Palestine, he defers to the equally loathsome Alan Dershowitz. 'No other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of human rights [than Israel],' Dershowitz tells us, 'been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civilians, tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace.'

If the Iraqis don't show sufficient gratitude to the Great White Father in Washington, if the Palestinians complain of slaughter in Gaza, it can only be because of their oogety boogety religion of murder:

In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.

At this point, the careful reader might protest that Harris has already revealed the Bible and the Torah to be awash with rapine and slaughter. Do Christians and Jews also belong to death cults? No, not so much:

Although we have seen that the Bible is a great reservoir of intolerance, for Christians and Jews alike—as everything from the writings of Augustine to the present actions of Israeli settlers demonstrates—it is not difficult to find great swaths of the Good Book, as well as Christian and Jewish exegesis, that offer counterarguments. The Christian who wants to live in the full presence of rationality and modernity can keep the Jesus of Matthew sermonising upon the mount and simply ignore the world-consuming rigmarole of Revelation.

You might think that Harris thus flatly contradicts his earlier argument about religious moderation—and you would be right. But, leaving aside the hypocrisy, a recognition that one can, after all, compartmentalise scriptural injunctions raises the obvious question of why particular verses take on especial significance in certain situations rather than others. In the wake of a homophobic beating in the United States, for instance, some newspapers carried photographs of a young tough tattooed with the biblical injunction 'Thou shall not lie with a male as one does with a woman. It is an abomination.' The remarkable image crystallised the problem: why do US evangelicals concern themselves so much with Leviticus 18:22 and not at all with the equally strident Leviticus 19:28 ('Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD), a verse generally taken to mean that God hates tattoos just as much as he hates haircuts (Leviticus 19:27).

Quite clearly, particular beliefs become activated in particular social and political settings: there's a historical context for the embrace of biblical homophobia, which is why the fundamentalist campaign against gay marriage does not extend to, say, demanding the death penalty for anyone who curses their parents (Leviticus 20:9). Harris, however, cannot acknowledge this most obvious of points, for his whole project depends upon understanding religion as a set of ideas divorced from history or culture or politics. He sees (in respect of Muslims, at least) the various sacred texts as divine instruction manuals, determinative of how believers interact with the world. That's why he takes fundamentalists as his paradigm— and that's why he explains away the conflicts in Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Caucasus as religious wars.

The inane insistence on religious doctrine as the explanation for all social behaviour runs throughout the New Atheist corpus, with even the much more genial Dawkins happy to wave away Ireland as a spat over God. That's why the movement really took off in the years following 9/11.

'Why do they hate us?' asked George Bush. If his answer ('They hate our freedoms') appealed viscerally to conservatives, the New Atheist reply ('They hate us because of their religion') provided an alternative rationale specially tailored for liberals. Thus, in the wake of 11 September, atheism opened the door to an understanding of the war on terror as—of all things—progressive. Here we were: sophisticated, democratic, secular; there they were: medieval, hierarchical, superstitious. Liberals who were too high-minded to invade Iraq for oil, and who found Bush's braying jingoism phoney and crass, knew that beardie weirdies reading from holy books represented only ignorance and repression—and, on that basis, regime change seemed long overdue.

Now, there's nothing inherently new about apologias for colonial adventures framed in terms of the backwardness of the natives and the foolishness of their religion. During the classical age of imperialism, it was a very familiar liberal argument: the East India Company would overcome the prejudices of the dusky Hindoo, the despoliation of Africa would liberate the dark continent from animism and superstition, and so on.

Back then, however, the beliefs of the subjugated were generally contrasted not with atheism but the God of the West: decent chaps agreed, for instance, that sati, the practice in which widows were forced to burn on the funeral pyre of their husbands, would be overcome only by shepherding Hindus into Christianity's kindly embrace.

But these days, as Terry Eagleton notes, God has shifted over from the side of civilisation to the side of barbarism. Precisely because, in the West, the enfeebled mainstream churches do not present a credible alternative to anything much at all, the old rhetoric works better if Christianity appears in the deficit column of the ledger, an example of backwardness rather than an instance of progress. By giving the traditional critique of native unreason an atheist twist (in which, rather than being foolish for refusing Jesus, the darkies are foolish for believing in God at all), Hitchens can free the old trope from colonial connotations and drape it, more or less credibly, in the vestments of radicalism.

But the liberals who nod along judiciously to his bluster about the Islamo-fascist threat (they're setting up a caliphate, don't you know!) rarely consider how an anti-religious conception of the war on terror leads Hitchens and the other imperial atheists to even more nakedly eliminationist positions than those adopted by the extreme right. The most conservative elements in the Bush administration — the people who openly saw the conflict simply in terms of US geopolitical hegemony — could, at least in theory, arrive at some accommodation with those locals willing to knuckle down under occupation. But if you interpret the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as skirmishes in a broader struggle against an international death cult, any result short of extermination became tantamount to surrender: there is, as we have learned, no such thing as 'moderation' in religion. Hence Hitchens' rejoinder to those who quailed at the bloodiness of the siege of Fallujah, which, according to non-government organisations, killed between 4,000 and 6,000 people, and destroyed 36,000 houses, 9,000 shops, 56 mosques and 60 schools. 'The death toll is not nearly high enough,' he said. '[T]oo many [jihadists] have escaped.'

In 2003, during the initial stages of the Iraq invasion, one of those pellets that Hitchens admires so much killed a 14-year-old Iraqi boy named Arkan Daif. Naturally, for the rest of world, Arkan's demise didn't register amid all the other collateral damage in Iraq (perhaps as many as a million excess deaths to date); equally naturally, for his family, his death was all-consuming. In his book Night Draws Near, Anthony Shadid describes how Arkan's relatives turned, in their grief, to religion, with the traditional dictates of an Islamic funeral busying the family and providing a structure to cope with their anguish.

Since time immemorial, the loss of a child turns parents to the consolation of faith. But in Iraq in 2003 Arkan's death represented not a private tragedy but a particular manifestation of a generalised catastrophe. Shadid explains:

The Muslim funeral rite was sadly routine in Iraq, but equally dignified and unhurried whenever it was performed. During the bombing, in times so precarious, such traditions began to assume new meaning; they were constants, filling time, busying and distracting relatives when their grief was greatest. At once formal and intimate, like the Arabic language, the rituals brought consolation and solace as the world outside grew ever more threatening and unpredictable.

Under attack, with your house in ruins and your son casually slaughtered, it is not logic that you seek, for any rational assessment confirms that what's happened can't be undone. Now, as our New Atheists will bray, prayer really won't guarantee your family's safety. But with shock and awe raining down on the city, neither will anything much else — and, under such circumstances, miracles appeal precisely because they're impossible.

Religion, says Marx, is the opium of the masses, a quotation that the New Atheists inevitably drag out, since it seems to confirm their approach. They, of course, see God as a kind of spiritual chloroform. For them, he's a magician's trick played on the weak-minded: that's why, if you reveal the hidden trapdoor behind the theological stage, believers will simply melt away like an audience walking out on a bumbling conjurer.

But Marx's argument was altogether different. Here's the notorious opium quote in context:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

The passage expands and completes the metaphor. As anyone who's been to hospital knows, opiates aren't simply a source of befuddlement. Whatever their side effects, they provide genuine relief from pain. Accordingly, if you're unhappy about a sick friend's morphine habit, you begin by treating their underlying illness—you don't simply snatch away their prescription.

If God doesn't create us, then we create God — and we do so because something about how we live makes him seem indispensable. Religion isn't overcome simply by demonstrating the intellectual fallacies that underpin it. It's overcome by changing the conditions under which God seems necessary: as Marx puts it, 'the struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion'.

Insofar as religion is, in certain contexts, on the rise, it reflects, more than anything else, the failure of secular alternatives in the face of intolerable conditions. That is what makes the self-satisfaction of the New Atheists so repulsive. If, in Australia, happy clapping evangelists are making inroads among the youth, it's not because the kids today are more stupid or gullible than their parents. In fact, the Hillsong-style congregations tend to be entirely at home with technology, and the young men and women drawn to them have, via the wonders of the internet, more information at their fingertips than any other generation in the history of the human race. Rather than smugly telling ourselves that the new religionists can't grasp our clever arguments, should we not consider another, less palatable, alternative: that they understand quite well what secular liberalism offers—and they don't find it very attractive?

To make the point another way, if, like Marx, we see religion as simultaneously an expression of alienation and a protest against it, where then does that leave the New Atheism? Do Hitchens and Harris and their ilk provide any kind of alternative to a lonely kid in the suburbs of Sydney? Or do they, with their Opera House lectures and their unholy enthusiasm for permanent war, counter the sigh of the oppressed only with the smug sneer of the oppressor?

Respectable Australia in the 21st century considers all manner of things sacred. But God, by and large, is not among them. If you want to cause thoroughgoing offence, you might, for instance, try speaking up against the Israeli apartheid state and its Australian partisans, on the basis that a modicum of justice for the Palestinians would do more to counter Islamism than the umpteenth plonking repetition of atheistic arguments already old a century ago. But that, of course, would be much less profitable than standing in the Opera House to tell the glitterati about how little you're scared by the bogey man.

Jeff Sparrow is the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence , the editor of Overland literary journal and a research fellow at Victoria University.