People Were Outraged By What Hitch Said His Entire Life, But Right Before He Died? He Was Still At It.

Christopher Hitchens’ greatest hits were compiled for this original video
by the Atheist Foundation of Australia.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author, philosopher, polemicist, debater, and journalist. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor and co-editor of over thirty books, including five collections of essays, and concentrated on a range of subjects, including politics, literature and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a “gadfly with gusto”. In 2009, Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the “25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media”.The same article noted that he would “likely be aghast to find himself on this list”, since it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism. Hitchens’s political perspective appears in his wide ranging writings, which include many of the political dialogues he published.

Hitchens actively supported drug policy reform and called for the abolition of the “War on Drugs” which he described as an “authoritarian war” during a debate with William F. Buckley. He supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, citing it as a cure for glaucoma and as treatment for numerous side-effects induced by chemotherapy, including severe nausea, describing the prohibition of the drug as “sadistic”.

Hitchens said that organized religion is “the main source of hatred in the world”, “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children”, and that accordingly it “ought to have a great deal on its conscience”. He often spoke about his efforts to champion the word ‘antitheist’ as he expressed his position that it was a relief that there is no evidence for a ‘celestial North Korea’. Atheism was a word not strong enough to encompass his feelings about the immoral conundrum that the existence of a deity would necessarily imply. In “God Is Not Great”, Hitchens said that:

“Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [alluding to Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.”

Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and a friend of Hitchens, said, “I think he was one of the greatest orators of all time. He was a polymath, a wit, immensely knowledgeable, and a valiant fighter against all tyrants including imaginary supernatural ones.”