As a child growing up outside London, British journalist James Hider came to view the Bible as a boring children's story.

His teachers taught the New Testament alongside tales of Olga da Polga (the talking guinea pig), Paddington Bear and Beatrix Potter.

By the time he headed to the Middle East to cover the chaos in Iraq, he saw religions as "a series of often gory stories, fables told to take the poor, isolated, individual sap out of himself for a little while, [and] let him forget that he is all alone in the universe."

Needless to say, James take a rather dim view of religious wars in "The Spiders of Allah: Travels of an Unbeliever on the Frontline of Holy War." a new memoir that he describes as "a romp through the madness that is the Middle East."

"The Spiders of Allah" is more readable than "The God Delusion" and less pompous than "God is Not Great." 

In 300 pages, James travels between meeting extremist Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Hamas TV producers transforming Mickey Mouse into an anti-Semitic revolutionary. 

James, now the Jerusalem-based Middle East correspondent for The Times of London, scoffs at Muslim extremists in Iraq who issue edicts banning the display of tomatoes and cucumbers side-by-side because they are viewed as representing female and male organs.

James describes US soldiers using the "Team America" soundtrack to try and rattle Iraqi insurgents and his distasteful first encounter with American corn dogs during the American effort to rout militants from Fallujah.

By 2005, James writes that he was becoming so "inured to the murderous pace" of Iraq that, when a suicide bomber shattered the windows of his hotel room early one morning, he went back to bed because he knew the attack would never make it into his paper.

The title of the book comes from a myth that spread across the Middle East that camel spiders sent by Allah were decimating Americans in Iraq.

The urban legend had its genesis in a photograph of two camel spiders hanging from a soldier's helmet in Iraq that whipped around the Internet.

Although James doesn't hide his atheist views, he doesn't often engage religious extremists in the book.

Instead, he lets the stories speak for themselves.

But you can get a glimpse of his views in the panel discussion below on "Frost over the World," the Al Jazeera English show with host David Frost.

"The Spiders of Allah" is already out in England and is scheduled to be released in the US this June.