Richard Dawkins is amongst the most provocative thinkers of our times. The Oxford University geneticist has waged a blazing intellectual war on religion, calling for the rule of science and rationality. At the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, Dawkins spoke with Vineet Gill about why he prefers science over faith, whether he is an ‘atheist fundamentalist’, – and issues such as immortality:

What are your views on moderate religion today? You’ve earlier called this ‘a seedbed for extremists’?

I have said that I fear it’s true that if children are taught, however moderately, that faith is a virtue, that you don’t need evidence to believe something, then that paves the way for a minority to be extremists. Everybody has been indoctrinated with this view that if it’s their faith, you can’t argue with them. I think that is pernicious. If children are taught they don’t need to defend their beliefs with evidence, that paves the way for extremism, the biggest damage religion does is indoctrinating and brainwashing children.

You believe passionately instead in science – but what happens when science gets it wrong?

Science doesn’t actually claim to know all the truth. It works hard by getting closer and closer to the truth, but of course science learns by its mistakes and advances by disproving hypotheses and getting things wrong. One of the virtues of science is that it is prepared to change its mind when the evidence warrants it. Public sharing is an important part of science. No scientist will ever say – ‘Oh, it’s true for me, it may not be true for you.’

Science gets space for research and development – why can’t we look at religion too as a living laboratory with people developing their thoughts, rather than just dismissing it?

It would be very nice to study religion in anthropological and psychological ways. By the way, I do think children need to be educated about religion. They just shouldn’t be told you belong only to this or that religion. They should be told, there is this religion and that religion. And when you grow up, you may – or may not – choose to join any of those.

If science were to triumph over time, would you like to become immortal with its help?

No. I think if there’s something frightening about death, it is eternity. And it’s equally frightening whether you’re there or not. Actually, it’s more frightening if you are there. Just imagine billions and billions and billions of years – terribly boring! I prefer to spend eternity under a general anaesthetic – and that is exactly what’s going to happen.

Stepping out of science, how do you explain the powerful effect faith has on people?

It is fascinating. What is it about faith that can make somebody kill? Patriotism is another one – people believe my country is right or wrong. In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

Rejecting belief outright, are you an atheist fundamentalist?

The term ‘fundamentalist’ means you stick to a holy book and never change your mind. I will change my mind whenever the evidence warrants it.

Finally, your thoughts on your friend and legendary fellow atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.

Phillip Adams presents a tribute to Late Night Live’s longest and most outstanding contributor, the late Christopher Hitchens, journalist, author and contrarian.

An eclectic collection of books sat wrapped under the Christmas tree for me this festive season. Among the crime novels and exotic cookbooks was Christopher Hitchens’s collection of essays, Arguably.

While very happy with all my gifts, Hitchens’s book, coming 10 days after his death from cancer, left me slightly melancholy.

In his recent Vanity Fair columns about the disease I had found a kindred spirit. Enduring a personal catastrophe of the kind Hitchens suffered can be an incredibly lonely journey of unwelcome discoveries, and he captured this.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, eulogised his friend: ”You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone.” I know what Carter meant.

From Hitchens’s first cancer column, written after his diagnosis in September 2010, it was evident that many of the unkind surprises his terminal illness threw up had been lobbed at me in the first year following the 2007 plane crash that left me with terrible injuries.

I didn’t have cancer, and I’m still here – very much enjoying the life that I have. But Hitchens, in many important ways, described my ”then”. You don’t forget these things.

When Hitchens wrote about the ”new land” he found himself in, which had its own language – ”a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication” – I knew precisely what he was talking about. Ondansetron became part of my new, unwanted vocabulary too, as did the names of various hideous antibiotics such as vancomycin (a ”drug of last resort”), and psychotropic drugs like lorazepam (to stop the nightmares).

I knew what Hitchens was feeling when in June 2011 he wrote about his despondency at realising cancer was claiming his voice: ”Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality.”

When I lost my legs, I lost an elemental part of who I was. I was a hiker of Wilsons Promontory, a trekker of the Himalayas, a marathon runner. When I catch that pungent eucalyptus scent I associate with running along Anzac Parade, the grand road leading up to the Australian War Memorial – and the start and finish of my Canberra training runs – I sometimes still cry.

In his last column for Vanity Fair, published posthumously in the January 2012 issue, Hitchens wrote about his ”not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write”, as his extremities grew increasingly painful and numb. ”Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my ‘will to live’ would be hugely attenuated”.

I understand this completely.

Even as I continue to grieve the loss of my legs, I am wondrous and grateful that of my four limbs, the only one that wasn’t destroyed or compromised was my right arm, and with it, the hand I use to write and type – the other intrinsic aspect of who I was, and am.

This last column of Hitchens also dealt with the subject of platitudes – those trite one-liners we use to reassure ourselves, which can become meaningless, even insulting, once we’ve known true suffering.

A few years ago I too started compiling a list of the more annoying ones. Two cited by Hitchens were on my list.

The first, attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, was ”Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. Hitchens debunked this: ”In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.”

For my part, I don’t think it’s only in the physical world that the lie inherent in this platitude is proven; imagine for a moment the enduring impact left on a mother who has lost her child to leukaemia.

Another favourite cliche Hitchens exploded was the equally ludicrous ”There but for the grace of god go I”.

I should acknowledge that for many people it is difficult to find the right words to convey one’s sorrow in the face of other people’s suffering. But really, no matter how well intentioned, it brings no comfort to someone less fortunate than you to be told ”had not god smiled on me, I might be where you are now”.

Hitchens left out one particularly ridiculous platitude that continues to irk me: ”Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day-to-day living that wears you out”.

Such words might bring succour to someone whose comfortable existence has never been challenged by true calamity, but frankly, only to them.

Of course, some maxims can have a very positive effect on a person in need of solace. While I was still in the burns unit, struggling to come to terms with what had been dealt me, a very wise man, now a friend, counselled me to ”focus on the things you can do, not the things you can’t”.

I’ve returned to that piece of advice many times since, and its power to lift me has never diminished.

Hitchens once wrote: ”The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed.”

I am one of those readers.

The world, which Christopher Hitchens would have happily admitted was already pretty dark, got a little darker yesterday. With his death, it also got a lot emptier.

Christopher was a beacon of knowledge and light in a world that constantly threatens to extinguish both. He had the courage to accept the world for just what it is, and not what we would like it to be. That is the highest praise I believe one can give to any intellect. He understood that the Universe doesn’t care about our existence, or our welfare, and epitomized the realization that our lives have meaning only to the extent we give them meaning.

For Christopher, this came through the credo that guided his life: the courageous defense of the simple proposition that skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

He embodied the delicious possibilities of existence and the profound sense of satisfaction that intellectual exploration, integrity, and bravery can bring, especially when confronting power with knowledge, even as he openly recognized that the possibility of a successful outcome in any such battle is always slim.

In that regard, he was always willing to speak out against injustice and ignorance wherever he saw it, no matter whose sensibilities he might ruffle in the process. He was a true contrarian, and he even wrote a guidebook for the rest of us on how to follow his example.

The moment one entered the Hitchens’ domain, one was overwhelmed by a single obsession: books. Books were everywhere, on every available wall, on the floor, on tables, couches and bathroom counters. But as becomes clear during the course of an evening of conversation, unlike for many of us, the books on Christopher’s wall were far more than window dressing. They were arranged according to subjects and ideas in a way that makes it more than clear that the books were regularly read and consulted, that the knowledge contained within them was used in a sense that few of us really adequately exploit. It was humbling to witness, close up, an intellectual that was so capable of surround a subject, relishing it, exploring it for its own sake, critically soaking up everything that is worth knowing. He was ever ready to incorporate this wisdom to shed light on old ideas or critically examine new ones with the full weight of a lifetime of intellectual exploration combined with the playful and curious excitement of a child in a candy store.

The last time I saw him, our discussions ranged from subjects relating to the nature of nothingness, quantum mechanics and a multiverse (subjects of a new book of mine that Christopher was writing the foreword for before his illness intervened), to the obscenity that is Capital Punishment, the madness that governs the religious fanaticism infecting both sides of the middle east conflict, the embarrassment that is Catholicism, and a related subject: the intellectual laziness and pretentious nonsense that encompasses so much of religious faith and theological noise in our popular culture.

Christopher was not a scientist, but he was fascinated by the power of science—not merely its possible impact on human affairs, but more importantly for him, and for me, the remarkable ideas that it generates. He was wise enough to recognize that the Universe is far more imaginative than we are, and as one who craved experience of all aspects of intellectual life, he was as eager to learn from the Universe as he was from the oeuvre of the worlds’ great writers, philosophers and historians.

Through his questions and reflections he extended my understanding of the implications of my own work. After I talked to him about the dismal future of an accelerating universe, he later used this idea to point out something remarkable that about a universe that could come from nothing. For those that think something coming from nothing is terribly improbable or impossible, just wait, nothing arising from something can happen just as easily. In the far future, the universe will be cold, dark, and empty. As he put it, when musing on our universal future: nothingness is heading straight toward us as fast as can be.

That idea didn’t terrify him. He realized that knowledge is not to be gained for comfort our soul but to enhance the awareness of being alive.

Just before leaving his company the last time I saw him, in one of those poetic accidents that makes life so unexpectedly enjoyable, I was reading a newspaper piece at his kitchen table about an emerging effort to ensure that young people at elite institutions preserve their Catholic upbringing during and after College. When describing the temptations to depart from piety, the author wrote: “Exposed to Nietzche, Hitchens, co-ed dorms and beer pong, such students are expected to stray.”

I reflected on what a remarkable tribute to the man this simple sentence represented. To be so overpowering in one’s cultural impact that one can be mentioned without explanation is one thing, but to be sandwiched between Nietzche and beer pong is an honor that very few of us can so hope to deservedly achieve.

Lawrence M. Krauss is Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. His newest book, A Universe from Nothing will appear in January 2012.

Away with the manger—in with the Solstice!

For a fact, the Christians stole Christmas. We don’t mind sharing the season with them, but we don’t like their pretense that it is the birthday of Jesus. It is the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun—Dies Natalis Invicti Solis.

Christmas is a relic of sun worship.

For all of our major festivals, there were corresponding pagan festivals tied to natural events. We’ve been celebrating the Winter Solstice, this natural holiday, long before Christians crashed the party. For millennia, our ancestors in the Northern Hemisphere have greeted this seasonal event with festivals of light, gift exchanges, and seasonal gatherings.

The Winter Solstice is the reason for the season. The Winter Solstice, December 22 this year, heralds the symbolic rebirth of the Sun, the lengthening of days, and the natural New Year.

We nonbelievers are quite willing to celebrate the fun parts of anybody’s holidays. We just want to be spared the schmaltz, the superstition—and the state/church entanglements.

The customs of this time of year endure because they are pleasant customs. It’s fun to hear from distant family and friends, to gather, to feast, to sing. Gifts, as freethinker Robert Ingersoll once remarked, are evidences of friendship, of remembrance, of love.

The evergreens displayed now as in centuries past flourish when all else seems dead, and are symbols, as is the returning sun, of enduring life.

In celebrating the Winter Solstice, we celebrate reality.

Annie Laurie Gaylor is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the nation’s largest association of freethinkers (atheists and agnostics).

I’ve just been reviewing my experiences with Christopher Hitchens.

He informed me, entertained me, provoked me like nobody else, and I will miss his antic spirit more than I can say. I didn’t know him for long, though I’d been reading his pieces, with mixed reactions, for years. We met in early 2007, and had dinner in Las Vegas, where we were both appearing in an Amazing Randi meeting. He kindled a happy bonfire of discussion that continued intermittently in meetings and emails.

One moment stands out, and it was, in fact, the last time I saw him face to face, in November of 2009, more than two years ago. We were both appearing in a debate as part of the program of Ciudad de las Ideas, an excellent gathering held annually in Puebla, Mexico. (It’s modeled on TED-I call it TED Mex. Go. It’s well worth the visit.) One of the speakers for the other side, the God side, was Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and after our short set pieces, the rebuttals started with the rabbi. We each were allotted four minutes only for rebuttal, and the rabbi launched into a series of outrageous claims trying to besmirch Darwin and evolutionary biology by claiming that Hitler was inspired by Darwin to organize slaughters to ensure the survival of his race. I sat there, dumfounded and appalled, and tried to figure out how best to rebut this obscene misrepresentation when my turn came.

Christopher didn’t wait his turn. “Shame! Shame!” he bellowed, interrupting Boteach in mid-sentence. It worked. Boteach backpedaled, insisting he was only quoting somebody who had thus opined at the time. Christopher had broken the spell, and a particularly noxious spell it was.

Why hadn’t I interrupted? Why had I let this disgusting tirade continue, politely waiting my turn? Because I was in diplomacy mode, polite and respectful, in a foreign country, following my host’s directions for how to conduct the debate. But what Christopher showed me–and I keep it in mind now wherever I speak–is that there is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude, as rude as you have to be to stop such pollution of young minds in its tracks with a quick, unignorable shock. Of course I knew that as a general principle, but I needed to be reminded, to be awakened from my diplomatic slumbers by his example.

We have all heard, endlessly, about how angry and rude the new atheists are. Take a good hard look at their work, at the books and talks by Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris, and you will find that they are more civil, less sneering, less given to name-calling than such religious apologists as Terry Eagleton or Alvin Plantinga or Leon Wieseltier. It is just that many people are shocked to see religious institutions, ideas, and spokespeople challenged as intensely as we expect banks, big pharma, and the oil industry to be challenged.

Of all the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” Hitchens was clearly the least gentle, the angriest, the one most likely to insult his interlocutor. But in my experience, he only did it when rudeness was well deserved–which is actually quite often when religion is the topic. Most spokespeople for religion expect to be treated not just with respect but with a special deference that is supposedly their due because the cause they champion is so righteous. Then they often abuse that privilege by using their time on the stage to misrepresent both their own institutions and the criticisms of them being offered.

How should one respond to such impostures? There are actually two effective methods, and I recommend both of them, depending on the circumstances: you can follow Hitch and interrupt (“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” or its equivalent). Or you can try something a little bit more diplomatic: You can call the person a faith fibber, my mock-diplomatic term for those who are liars for God. If you are sure your interlocutor is just another religious bully, go Hitch’s route: Call him a liar, and don’t stop until he stops. If you think your interlocutor may have been lured a little over the line of truth by otherwise commendable zeal, you can ask them if they aren’t indulging in a little faith fibbing. That works on occasion too.

The main point is this: Don’t let anybody play the God card in these discussions as if it were a “Get Out of Jail Free” card that excuses misrepresentation. Hitch would not hesitate to call out the pope, or Mother Teresa, or anybody else. Honor his memory by following his example.

The moment it was announced that Christopher Hitchens was sick with cancer, eulogies began spilling into print and from the podium. No one wanted to deny the possibility that he would recover, of course, but neither could we let the admiration we felt for him go unexpressed. It is a cliché to say that he was one of a kind and none can fill his shoes—but Hitch was and none can. In his case not even the most effusive tributes ring hollow. There was simply no one like him.

One of the joys of living in a world filled with stupidity and hypocrisy was to see Hitch respond. That pleasure is now denied us. The problems that drew his attention remain—and so does the record of his brilliance, courage, erudition, and good humor in the face of outrage. But his absence will leave an enormous void in the years to come. Hitch lived an extraordinarily large life. (Read his memoir, Hitch-22, and marvel.) It was too short, to be sure—and one can only imagine what another two decades might have brought out of him—but Hitch produced more fine work, read more books, met more interesting people, and won more arguments than most of us could in several centuries.

I first met Hitch at a dinner at the end of April 2007, just before the release of his remarkable book god is not Great. After a long evening, my wife and I left him standing on the sidewalk in front of his hotel. His book tour was just beginning, and he was scheduled to debate on a panel the next morning. It was well after midnight, but it was evident from his demeanor that his clock had a few hours left to run. I had heard the stories about his ability to burn the candle at both ends, but staggering there alongside him in the glare of a street lamp, I made a mental note of what struck me as a fact of nature—tomorrow’s panel would be a disaster.

I rolled out of bed the following morning, feeling quite wrecked, to see Hitch holding forth on C-SPAN’s Book TV, dressed in the same suit he had been wearing the night before. Needless to say, he was effortlessly lucid and witty—and taking no prisoners. There should be a name for the peculiar cocktail of emotion I then enjoyed: one part astonishment, one part relief, two parts envy; stir. It would not be the last time I drank it in his honour.

Since that first dinner, I have felt immensely lucky to count Hitch as a friend and colleague—and very unlucky indeed not to have met him sooner. Before he became ill, I had expected to have many more years in which to take his company for granted. But our last meeting was in February of this year, in Los Angeles, where we shared the stage with two rabbis. His illness was grave enough at that point to make the subject of our debate—Is there an afterlife?—seem a touch morbid. It also made traveling difficult for him. I was amazed that he had made the trip at all.

The evening before the event, we met for dinner, and I was aware that it might be our last meal together. I was also startled to realize that it was our first meal alone. I remember thinking what a shame it was—for me—that our lives had not better coincided. I had much to learn from him.

I have been privileged to witness the gratitude that so many people feel for Hitch’s life and work—for, wherever I speak, I meet his fans. On my last book tour, those who attended my lectures could not contain their delight at the mere mention of his name—and many of them came up to get their books signed primarily to request that I pass along their best wishes to him. It was wonderful to see how much Hitch was loved and admired—and to be able to share this with him before the end.

I will miss you, brother.

Christopher Hitchens died with friends at his side at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston Thursday 15th December. These words and similar headlines circled the globe in an expanding electronic wave, carrying news that the inevitable had happened. This death amongst the many thousands who died that day had special meaning for an ever-growing demographic of like-thinkers.

Strangely, the inescapable reality that Christopher Hitchens was terminally ill with stage four oesophageal cancer still deeply affected all who were aware of his plight. Death was not the direct result of cancer; instead, pneumonia, a complication of oesophageal cancer, dealt the final blow.

Thus died a person of note, removing forever from existence a gigantic intellect and one many felt greatly honoured in being alive at the same time as him. Even knowing these details, there followed shock and feelings of intense sadness, which enveloped admirers and possibly a scattering of disparagers. It is some consolation that though his physical presence is forever removed from existence, his writings and message lives on.

Christopher often pointed out to interviewers that even though his eventual death could be classified as premature, they also would go down the same path. It is a mental protection mechanism of humanity to look upon the impending or actual death of others as a them-and-us situation. A healthy mind does not wish for its own extinction. This powerful influence is a driving factor in many aspects of human life.

‘Hitch’, as he was affectionately known, would have had the same fears and aspirations as us all. The one and big difference is that his atheism did not allow these fantasies to overpower his thinking to the point of surrendering to the comfort of popular myths. Hitch died an atheist, having no imaginary expectations clouding his last moments.

The life of Christopher Hitchens was indeed one that should be celebrated, dare I say revered. His prolific written and verbal battle against human-made systems of a totalitarian, fascist or dictatorial nature places him amongst other enlightenment empowering characters such as Paine, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Hume.

Everyone, and that includes many of Hitch’s most fervent admirers, did not agree with everything he had to say. Indeed, many disagreed quite aggressively to the point where he fell out of favour with old friends. This brings us to the point of asking: was Christopher Hitchens always right and others misguided with that being his rightful claim to fame?

That question is of course so subjective that it cannot be answered satisfactorily but it is the crux of the title of this essay. It is the great protection afforded civilisation by atheism. It is the underpinning of a method of thought that recognises no human concept or reliance on tradition can provide absolute answers. Hitch understood this perfectly well and that was a part of his greatness. It was not so much that many of his thoughts tied up with ideas held in common or the brilliant delivery of resounding argument; rather it was his ability to use logical progression to arrive at rational conclusions.

As pointed out, other atheists use ‘logical progression to arrive at rational conclusions’ as well, but they can be at variance to those of Christopher Hitchens. Having said that, most of the ideas held passionately by Christopher would also be agreed with by the majority of atheists. Those ideas are not accepted because ‘Hitch’ enunciated them; they are accepted because atheists in general came to the same conclusion by following the evidence. This is unlike other systems where revealed writings or traditions are unchangeable and unchallengeable (in the short term) and are ‘believed’ to be correct even when the evidence shows them not to be.

Revering the works and words of Christopher Hitchens is really giving acclaim to an outstanding proponent of reason and clear thinking processes. He had the remarkable ability to place shared concepts, ideas and thoughts in an order not easily achievable by others. His outstanding written and oral delivery provided a basis for his colleagues, friends and admirers to build their own repertoires into more workable condition.

We can expect detractors to exit from the woodwork over the next months. There will be half-true and untrue rumours and stories of a hateful nature, which will only go to reinforce the greatness of this one human who once trod the earth in a dignified manner. The intensity of his life and bravery to the end were examples of the finest of human qualities. If but everyone could emulate them.

The death of Christopher Hitchens has special significance for the Atheist Foundation of Australia. He was booked to appear at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention – ‘A Celebration of Reason’ in April next year along with the other acclaimed Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. Christopher knew, as did we, that this was a gamble with time. If pneumonia had not stepped into the scene, the Four Horsemen would have been together at a public forum for the first time.

I know I can speak for the audience and everyone involved with this convention in saying that we are all deeply and profoundly sad that one of the four chairs on centre stage will be empty.

David Nicholls is the President of the Atheist Foundation of Australia.

On 7 October, I recorded a long conversation with Christopher Hitchens in Houston, Texas, for the Christmas edition of New Statesman which I was guest-editing.

He looked frail, and his voice was no longer the familiar Richard Burton boom; but, though his body had clearly been diminished by the brutality of cancer, his mind and spirit had not. Just two months before his death, he was still shining his relentless light on uncomfortable truths, still speaking the unspeakable (“The way I put it is this: if you’re writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word ‘fascist’, if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with ‘extreme-right Catholic party’”), still leading the charge for human freedom and dignity (“The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do”) and still encouraging others to stand up fearlessly for truth and reason (“Stridency is the least you should muster … It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements’.”).

The following day, I presented him with an award in my name at the Atheist Alliance International convention, and I can today derive a little comfort from having been able to tell him during the presentation that day how much he meant to those of us who shared his goals.

I told him that he was a man whose name would be joined, in the history of the atheist/secular movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, David Hume. What follows is based on my speech, now sadly turned into the past tense.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know. He was a reader whose breadth of reading was simultaneously so deep and comprehensive as to deserve the slightly stuffy word “learned” – except that Christopher was the least stuffy learned person you could ever meet.

He was a debater who would kick the stuffing out of a hapless victim, yet did it with a grace that disarmed his opponent while simultaneously eviscerating him. He was emphatically not of the school that thinks the winner of a debate is he who shouts loudest. His opponents might have shouted and shrieked. Indeed they did. But Hitch didn’t need to shout, for he could rely instead on his words, his polymathic store of facts and allusions, his commanding generalship of the field of discourse, and the forked lightning of his wit.

Christopher Hitchens was known as a man of the left. But he was too complex a thinker to be placed on a single left-right dimension. He was a one-off: unclassifiable. He might be described as a contrarian except that he specifically and correctly disavowed the title. He was uniquely placed in his own multidimensional space. You never knew what he would say about anything until you heard him say it, and when he did, he would say it so well, and back it up so fully, that if you wanted to argue against him you had better be on your guard.

He was recognised throughout the world as a leading public intellectual of our time. He wrote many books and countless articles. He was an intrepid traveller and a war reporter of signal valour. But he had a special place in the affections of atheists and secularists as the leading intellect and scholar of our movement. A formidable adversary to the pretentious,

the woolly-minded or the intellectually dishonest, he was a gently encouraging friend to the young, the diffident, and those tentatively feeling their way into the life of the freethinker and not certain where it would take them.

He inspired, energised and encouraged us. He had us cheering him on almost daily. He even begat a new word – the hitchslap. It wasn’t just his intellect we admired: it was also his pugnacity, his spirit, his refusal to countenance ignoble compromise, his forthrightness, his indomitable spirit, his brutal honesty.

And in the very way he looked his illness in the eye, he embodied one part of the case against religion. Leave it to the religious to mewl and whimper at the feet of an imaginary deity in their fear of death; leave it to them to spend their lives in denial of its reality. Hitch looked it squarely in the eye: not denying it, not giving in to it, but facing up to it squarely and honestly and with a courage that inspires us all.

Before his illness, it was as an erudite author, essayist and sparkling, devastating speaker that this valiant horseman led the charge against the follies and lies of religion. During his illness he added another weapon to his armoury and ours – perhaps the most formidable and powerful weapon of all: his very character became an outstanding and unmistakable symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism, as well as of the worth and dignity of the human being when not debased by the infantile babblings of religion.

Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch was in a foxhole, and he dealt with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he showed himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

Farewell, great voice. Great voice of reason, of humanity, of humour. Great voice against cant, against hypocrisy, against obscurantism and pretension, against all tyrants including God.

Editor’s Note: Philosopher, author, and BNR columnist A.C. Grayling sent us these thoughts today on the news of Christopher Hitchens’ death at 62.

Even those who were on the opposite side of any argument from Christopher Hitchens were compelled to admire the sharpness, control, and extraordinary richness of his mind. We sometimes use the word “brilliant” to describe clever people, but rarely does the term apply with such exactness as it does to Hitch’s intellectual quality, and also to his writing. I class him among the first rank of essayists in the English language, and am certain that he will be permanently anthologized alongside the likes of Addison, Hazlitt and Gore Vidal. Equally, though, he will be remembered for the causes he espoused — or perhaps it is better to say: the cause. His cause was liberty: liberty of thought, liberty from the forms of oppression that preachers, demagogues, and tyrants try to exercise over human lives; liberty too from falsehood and ignorance and from all kinds of self-serving failures of integrity and intellectual honesty.

On this last point Hitch’s critics tried to make mileage by turning it against him: he was accused of abandoning his left-leaning attitudes when he supported the Iraq War. What this in fact showed was how much his accusers misunderstood him. Until the end of his life Hitch regarded himself as a man of the left, though like at least some of us in the same camp he had long given up thinking that erstwhile commitments of that position, especially in economics, were viable. The anger he felt over 9/11 required of him an unequivocal resistance to terrorism and religion-inspired atrocity, which is why he took the stance he did; his motive was emphatically good, whatever one thinks of the means he supported. But the key point is that Hitch was consistent in his principles, and the stance he took after 9/11 displays that consistency. He was against oppression, whether it was the oppression of Mother Theresa’s denial of contraception to women in poverty-stricken, over-populated Calcutta, or the oppression attempted by Al-Qaeda, or the oppression of religion more generally.

Truly independent minds are rare. Hitch had the outstanding talent to live by his writing and his opinions, and was able always to think for himself and to challenge others to think too; he was independent, and sought to encourage, cajole, and argue others into independence of mind likewise.

Just before he was diagnosed with the cancer that has taken him from us, Hitch and I were both at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales. I was asked to do a short piece for television on the chained-book library at Hereford Cathedral nearby, and as I came out of the library after the filming and walked into the main body of the cathedral, who should I see but Hitch walking briskly in. We both said the same thing at the same time: “What are YOU doing here?” Hitch said that he had come to hear the cathedral’s admired choir perform Evensong. The next day when we were having a drink together he said, “I enjoy the music, but it becomes harder and harder to stomach everything that goes along with it.” If you look up what Hazlitt said about Edmund Burke, whose politics he loathed but whose writing he admired, you will see there the kind of intellectual sensibility that Hitch also had: which is why he is so often likened to Voltaire, Orwell, and Hazlitt himself. This is high praise I give him, but not one jot misplaced. For that kind of mind is the best kind, and it was Hitch’s kind; and it is one that will be sorely missed because, more than ever now, it is so needed in this muddled world of ours.