Christopher Hitchens – Dead at 62

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“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”
― Christopher Hitchens

I was born into a Presbyterian family, became an evangelical in High School, then an agnostic after a particularly eye-opening summer camp experience, then a pagan, then back to an agnostic, and finally … about five or six years ago, I dropped all pretenses and went back to my natural state – atheist.

These days, I often rail against all of the navel gazing that the big atheists do. There’s a good point to it … much of the world still has archaic beliefs about what an atheist is, what we believe and what kind of people we are … but as an atheist, it’s exhausting to have to say over and over and over again why you don’t believe in god. People like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins do that work for us, so that we can go about our lives without having to stop and explain every few seconds.

I have a Vanity Fair subscription just for Hitchens. It will now lapse. Sadly. The man was a breed of man that rarely exists anymore. Well-groomed and extraordinarily well-spoken, well-written, well-anything. He often showed up at speaking appearances with a glass of liquor in one hand instead of a glass of water. He said what he thought, very eloquently, and didn’t pull punches. Ever. This is a man who once got beaten down because he could not stand to let a sign with a swastika on it be left untouched… and here’s what he said about THAT:

“Once you credit them like that,” he said, “you do all their work for them. They should have been worried about us. Let them worry. Let them wonder if we’re carrying a tool or if we have a crew. I’d like to go back, do it properly, deface the thing with red paint so there’s no swastika visible. You can’t have the main street, a shopping and commercial street, in a civilized city patrolled by intimidators who work for a Nazi organization. It is not humanly possible to live like that. One must not do that. There may be more important problems in Lebanon, but if people on Hamra don’t dare criticize the SSNP, well fuck. That’s occupation.”

We need more people like that in this world. People who are unafraid of what the consequences may be for standing up for what is right.

I didn’t always agree with Hitchens, but I’ve always reveled in reading or hearing what he had to say. How could one not? Such eloquence, such mastery of the English language, such undaunted, unwavering, unswerving devotion to doing the right thing.

Rest in Peace, Christopher Hitchens. Rare is the man today made like you.