First of all, let me say that I love Christopher Hitchens, and I think he is a great writer and thinker.
When Hitchens says religion spoils everything, he’s referring to the barbaric practices and ignorant metaphysical claims that are cited in the bible. And yes, if we were to follow those practices and beliefs today it would be utterly wicked of us (kill disobedient children etc). No decent (non-fundie) religious person is denying that. However, that doesn’t make the bible useless. There are non-factually related elements to the bible that are very relevant to us today. In the contexts that the bible was written, it was a progressive document… not barbaric at all… quite revolutionary. Taken within its context gives a better understanding of what it is saying, and what meaning it could have for us today.
My argument is that it isn’t religion that causes these horrible atrocities throughout history, but it’s the people in those religions. Of course you can look through history and find a good number of terrible people doing terrible things, and they are religiously inclined. However, this is correlational, and can’t properly give us a right to say that religion causes these things. What about the number of people who have done good things? The chances are that there are more religious than non-religious in their ranks as well, because there are simply more religious people. I guess my argument is akin to the old phrase”guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The tools of humanity: blades, fire, guns, language, the press, religion, science, the internet…. they all are neither good nor evil. They are amoral phenomena that enhance the ability of a human to enact his own will. It is the will of that human being wielding the tool that is either good or evil, not the tool itself.
I would imagine it very difficult to come up with the best arguments against religion if there is no decent counter-argument to challenge oneself with. I think that is the case with atheism vs theism today. Theists are not making good arguments for their beliefs (with a few exceptions… <3 Father Coine). The arguments of atheists don’t have to be that good to defeat the arguments of the theists, and therefore, there may be a good number of arguments from atheists that are weak if really scrutinized… it’s all natural selection 
I would like to ask Hitchens this: Do you think that human morality 100 years from now will be just the same as today’s? Do you think that anything from today’s morality should be saved and used, within its context, 100 years in the future or will it all be worthless? Not so that I can prove my point and say “viola!”… I want to ask him because I honestly don’t know what he’d say.
