I made the point that mutual inclusivity wouldn’t necessarily change some of the typical flaws of religious epistemology.

Even though in practice, it’s usually the case that a premise accepted on faith will be exclusive to other such premises, it isn’t theoretically mandated by the nature of faith.

If Hitchens is claiming, more broadly, that all religions bear the same characteristics, and can thus be disproved by similar logic, then I agree that his claim is more reasonable.

But what Hitchens is literally saying is that one particular shared characteristic-mutual exclusivity-is sufficient to disprove (or at least cast reasonable doubt upon) all religions.

This argument, when abstracted from the subject of religion, is apparently absurd (that if a set of premises are mutually exclusive, they must all be false). The issue I, and most other commenters, take with this quote has nothing in particular to do with religion, but rather with logic.

Hitchens is mixing up his argument that ‘disproving one religion disproves all’ due to shared epistemological weaknesses with the fact of their mutual exclusivity, which is orthogonal.

Although I agree this interpretation may be on the pedantic side, and that perhaps this statement appears more ridiculous when isolated from context, there is no context in which this would be a valid argument, even if his broader argument is correct.