But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive, would want to base itself on such vague pre-Christian desert morality (assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).

Christopher Hitchens on the Ten Commandments, unfortunately confirming my long held suspicion that the man is an unabashed Voltairian anti-semite.

It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries?

This is classic Enlightenment style anti-semitism. The Jews are brutal, uncivilized, anti-philosophical, primitive, murderous, intolerant, the source of the evil historical force of oppressive monotheism, etc. Gross. But here's the kicker:

Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.

I think this is rich coming from a longtime supporter of the genocidal North Vietnamese government and a myriad other leftist totalitarian regimes around the world. I'd say that the only thing incongruent with morality going on here is Christopher Hitchen's ideology.