Obituary: Christopher Hitchens

As an agnostic (defined here as an atheist who is still listening) I've repeatedly come across the works of Christopher Hitchens. I haven't actually read any of his books. But I have enjoyed many of his articles and interviews and really enjoyed his debates.

Richard Dawkins is a level headed, even keeled, scientific sort whose books (that I also haven't read) approach the concept of god from a biological and otherwise science based stand. He has converted many Bible thumpers with cold reason.

Christopher Hitchens had the science based arguments in his repertoire, too, but he wasn't nearly as even tempered. He had no qualms about calling a moron a moron. His arguments included pointing out the abysmal logic of The Bible and worse logic of it's believers.

Despite our similar thinking, it took me awhile to warm to Hitchens. Largely because when I first looked at his writing he was convinced that the invasion of Iraq was justified because everyone knew Saddam had nukes. I don't know where he got his news from, but I always had trouble understanding how ANYONE could believe that. And that tinted most everything of his that I read. Eventually, he admitted that he had been working with flawed information and that the war was the result of a grand con job. That he was willing to change his opinion based on new information improved my view of him significantly. He became, in my view, not just an atheist with great, and sometimes cruel, debate skills, but fell into the definition of agnostic that I used back in the first line of this post. You'd never catch Ken Ham or Ray Comfort changing their story when proven wrong or given new information. And they have been, oh so many times.

In June 2010 he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. The same thing that killed his father. It caused him to cancel a book tour, but didn't stop him from continuing to write and debate and give the occasional talk. The cancer and the treatment showed on him, but where it was possible to keep working, keep debating, and keep educating he still showed up and made no effort to put makeup over what was happening to him. He was forced to cancel many events when his voice failed, but only then.

One thing he made clear early on was that there would be no deathbed conversion. Christians often try to claim that prominent nay sayers of their God changed their mind as they died. Charles Darwin is one of the most famous cases of this, but anyone who claimed to have seen it has been proven not to have been in the room. Hitchens said that if for any reason he says otherwise in the hours before he passes that he can guarantee that it was the drugs talking.

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I wrote this Wednesday just because I wanted one ready. Wrote about what I knew Hitchens for - his trashing of theists. But he was a writer first and a writer about religious issues second. He continued writing articles on a variety of subjects right up until two days ago. He documented his development of cancer and gradual passing from it beautifully. I figure it'll end up in future versions of his biography "Hitch 22" and could be used as reading to help others with terminal cancer.

There are plenty of other eulogies out there. But one of the best has to have come from The Onion.

Source: The Onion