To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?

In this rhetorical question, Hitchens attacks two practices he associated with traditional, especially Abrahamic, religion: inculcating fear through doctrines of eternal punishment and legitimizing women’s subordination as divinely ordained. By pairing them, he frames both as socially corrosive outcomes of dogma—harm done not merely to individual believers but to the moral and civic health of society. The phrasing invites a utilitarian, human-centered audit of religious teachings: whatever their metaphysical claims, do they produce humane consequences? The question form also signals his characteristic polemical style, pressing the listener to concede that such effects are incompatible with any defensible notion of “the good.”