“You don’t so much as become an atheist as find out that’s what you are. There’s no moment of conversion. You don’t suddenly think ‘I don’t believe this anymore.’ You essentially find you don’t believe it,” Christopher Hitchens
said in an interview with Sally Quinn. Like so many of his words, this hit home for me. Yesterday, freethought lost a giant. Christopher Hitchens died at age 62. He leaves a hole in FFRF’s Honorary Board that none can fill.
Hitch is one of my three favorite writers along with Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain. I began each week by reading his Slate.com article and eagerly awaited any Vanity Fair articles or new videos of his debates. His article on the Ten Commandments inspired me to write a book about the fallacy that America is founded on Judeo-Christian principles and the first ten chapters compare the Decalogue to our Constitution. He was prolific, witty, brilliant, and a whole host of other adjectives that writers with more talent and more knowledge of Hitch as a man will use to describe him. When I read Hitch, I wished I could write like him. When I heard him speak, I wished I could sound like him.
Though I never met him personally it was hard not to feel like he was a friend. Hitch’s writing demolished the crumbling walls of my religious cognitive dissonance. Thousands of people realized that they were atheists and gathered the courage to say so because of his words. Without doubt, that will be his greatest legacy. Though he died, his ideas will endure and help free thousands of future readers from the mind-forged manacles of religion.
The only immortality any person can hope to have is in the minds of our friends and family and in the words we pass on. Hitch had an almighty gift for both writing and speaking. Fortunately, he left us a library of literature and debates. Tonight, I’ll watch you trounce the Catholic Church, raise a glass of Johnny Walker Black and toast to you, Hitch. Thank you for all you have done, I’m going to miss you.
