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Christopher Hitchens


Columnist/Commentator

From a profile of Hitchens in the Washington Post on February 12, 1999:

She gives him his ticket and he scurries toward the plane, wheezing under the weight of two pieces of luggage. "In addition to being a socialist and an atheist, I'm a libertarian," he says. It was these absurd airline security procedures that made him a libertarian, he explains: Why should you have to show a photo ID to get on a plane? A terrorist can get a photo ID. It's a topic he aired at some comic length in his column in Vanity Fair. "The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID," he grumbles, "is that you can't fly home."

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Besides writing the Minority Report column in The Nation, Hitchens is "Critic at Large" for Vanity Fair. In addition to this he has written a book The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995) which debunks the uncritical sanctification of Mother Theresa. He has produced a TV documentary based on the book which was broadcast in Britain on Channel Four.

In the Fall 1996 issue of Free Inquiry Hitchens is interviewed by Matt Cherry and says: "I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself."

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From an June 03, 2006 article [1] entitled The world according to Hitch in the Christian magazine WORLD:

And lest anyone doubt where he stands on religion: "I think religion is a deadly threat to the survival of the species and to the continued evolution of the brain." In debates he is quick to call himself an "anti-theist." Why not simply an atheist?

"An atheist can still say he wishes it was true. It would be nice if it was true. I can't see why it would be nice if it was true. I simply can't see that. To have pre-cradle to post-grave round-the-clock supervision and surveillance by someone with a very devious form of morality," he says, "who wants this to be true? I'm delighted that there's no reason to think that it's true. It's humanity's most obvious falsification."

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Hitchens' latest book is entitled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

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The Christopher Hitchens Web may be found at http://www.hitchensweb.com/.

Saluting the life of Christopher Hitchens

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