Christopher Hitchens

As almost everyone has heard, Christopher Hitchens died yesterday.  Infamous as an atheist, infamous as a thorn in the side of political liberals and others opposed to the war on terrorism post-9/11, he was a provocative writer, also interesting even if dead wrong, sometimes nasty, scathing, and unprepared for death as he says in this BBC story/video. What he meant must be that he just didn't feel ready to die, since he did not believe in any afterlife or judgment. It is a curious feature of a material universe that has no god, nothing more than matter, that it has produce, evolved, physical entities who care to discuss whether or not there is any purpose in the universe, and even decide their purpose in life is to argue that there is no purpose in the universe to be found anywhere. Hitchens would no doubt roll his eyes at this and other such comments (if he didn't say something scathing), but he certainly must have "enjoyed," if that's the right word, the fact that others ask him his opinions, that he had interview requests, and people bought his books after he labored to write them. He freed himself in a sense to be his own god, yet constrained to inhabit a world of other gods whom he often got the better of in argument. May the merciful God have mercy on his soul.