Read it here.Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.
One of the most dismaying aspects of this campaign has been the extent to which normally intelligent people were willing to suspend their disbelief. Years ago Carl Sagan warned us that we were living in "demon-haunted" times. He was warning about religious belief, but the real danger, as Hitchens reminds us lies, not in religion per se, but in the unreasoning secular cults that have grown up in its absence.
