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...That “Hitchens delights too much…” is indeed true, which is why he refers to himself as an “anti-theist.” The greatest issue with the death bed conversion is that a death bed is not guaranteed. Whoever said that you will rest upon a death bed and reflect upon your life, etc.? One car wreck or one fallen piano could spell your instant demise. Daniel Dennett suffered a heart attack and he took pleasure in praising man and science for his physical salvation stating, “Thank goodness I’m alive.” Richard Dawkins stated that he is going to record his death bed experience so...

WASHINGTON -- Christopher Hitchens -- bald from cancer treatments, speaking between doctor's appointments -- has a special disdain for deathbed religious conversions. Appearing before a group of journalists organized by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life, he criticized the pressures put on Tom Paine to embrace Christianity and the malicious rumors of faith that followed Charles Darwin's demise. "I've already thought about this a great deal, thanks all the same," he explained. The idea "that you may be terrified" is no reason to "abandon the principles of a lifetime." At this event -- a joint appearance with his...

I just lost a young friend to cancer, I watched my own stepfather die of the type of cancer that is now afflicting Christopher Hitchens, I am only concerned here with two things- his conversion and his bodily healing.I never “hated” Hitchens, I didn’t always disagree with his politics, but his extreme views against Faith/Belief in God were indicative of something missing on the inside for him.  In this interview he speaks a little about the trauma of suicide in his family- particularly his mother. It seems to me that the little child within all of us eventually wins out-...

The author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything says it is "touching" that many Christians are praying for his healing, both body and soul. Iconoclastic atheist Christopher Hitchens, whose columns appear in the Chicago Sun-Times, has been stricken with esophageal cancer, a disease that leaves few survivors. Conservative Catholic writer Thomas Peters has challenged readers of the American Papist website to join him in praying one Hail Mary a day on behalf of Hitchens for salvation and that "God will be with him at the hour of his death." Hitchens told evangelical broadcaster Hugh Hewitt that he...

Hitchens discusses anti-Semitism, Iran, religion, and cancer with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and novelist Martin Amis.

Damian Thompson has posted an excerpt from a pre-view of Christopher Hitchins’ latest piece for Vanity Fair in which he admits to the regret that he most probably won’t live long enough to see the death of Pope Benedict due to his cancer.Christopher Hitchens also takes the opportunity to repeat his groundless slur that the Holy Father is a ‘criminal’.Mr Hitchens writes: “Will I really not live long enough … to read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly criminals like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”Protect the Pope comment: It’s understandable that when someone is suffering from...

Vanity Fair have sent me a preview of Christopher Hitchens’s very unpleasant piece about his cancer – unpleasant not just because Hitchens describes in detail the invasion of his body by a monstrous tumour, but also because it contains a despicable slur against the Pope. (And Henry Kissinger, but I don’t care about that.) He writes: “Will I really not live long enough … to read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly criminals like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”This should scarcely need saying, but Pope Benedict XVI is not a criminal: neither Hitchens nor anyone else...

What I learned about Hugo Chávez's mental health when I visited Venezuela with Sean Penn.Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez's politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela's capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America's rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written article by Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the...

Here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church. This schismatic crackpot sect is headed by Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, a nutty autodidact with a sideline in Holocaust denial. Like many ultra-conservative Catholics, the Gibsons, père et fils, have never forgiven the Vatican for lifting the charge of deicide against the Jews in 1964. Less well-remembered, perhaps, is the interview in which he announced that his wife of...

HH: Special edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show, which I am going to spend entirely with Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair columnist, author of the bestseller, God Is Not Great, and a new extraordinary memoir, Hitch-22. And Christopher Hitchens, welcome back, it’s great to talk with you. CH: Very nice of you to have me. HH: Now Christopher, since we last spoke, your illness you disclosed on the web, and people will want to know off the bat how you are doing, and how your treatment is going. CH: Oh well, I have, in case people are just tuning in, I...

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I had just finished this essay when I heard the terrible news that my friend Christopher had a cancer whose prognosis was dire. My heart and thoughts go out to him, as they would to a brother. I have known Christopher as a man of great courage and decency and have an affection for him that is not adequately expressed in the intellectual argument that follows. It is indeed an intellectual argument, and Christopher, I am sure, will welcome it as a testament to the way in which he has challenged us all — just as I am...

Christopher Hitchens, as Goldblog readers undoubtedly know, has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. I've been e-mailing a bit with him over the past couple of days, and he sounds like the same old Hitchens, which is good, because our civilization (not to mention our magazine) needs the same old Hitchens around for a while. In one e-mail to him, I wrote, "I'm thinking of you and (insert prayer joke here)." Hitchens, who is America's most famous and pugnacious atheist, has by now received several dozen variants of this same line, undoubtedly doesn't want my prayers, and since I don't necessarily...

Christopher Hitchens – a magnificent writer and human rights campaigner with, alas, a crazed hatred of religion – has cancer. These are the messages the Independent columnist Johann Hari broadcast to his nearly 10,000 Twitter followers last night.

AUTHOR, journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens has announced he has cancer of the oesophagus and will undergo treatment. Hitchens revealed his condition in a three-sentence statement on the website of Vanity Fair, a magazine to which he regularly contributes, and said he would have to cut short his current book tour. “I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my oesophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice,” Hitchens said. The English-born Hitchens, 61, was in the middle of...

OS ANGELES (Reuters) – British-born author Christopher Hitchens on Wednesday cut short a book tour to undergo chemotherapy, which several media outlets reported was because the heavy smoker has been diagnosed with cancer. "I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice," Hitchens, 61, said in a statement released through his publishers Twelve. A representative for the publisher offered no details beyond the statement. Hitchens, known to be a heavy smoker, launched...

Looks like the Scotch and Cigs got him.

It was my first week in London. My employer instructed me to sign up for “free healthcare,” if there is such a thing. Thankfully, the paperwork was easy because I carried a European Union passport, but I had to visit my local “clinic,” if that’s the right word. (It looked more like a shabby chic Edwardian flat.) The doctor was nice enough but her broken English was hard to follow. The next year, I visited a friend in a grotty hospital, and was equally unimpressed. His room was crowded, noisy and outdated. Still, on the plus side, visiting the year...

(clip) Suddenly he discussed the sexiness of Margaret Thatcher. The way he described Thatcher and how the press treated the "Iron Lady," you'd think he was talking about Sarah Palin. Even the radio host thought so. However, Hitchens said Palin was contrary to his description of Thatcher. He said Palin has no charisma. I find that hard to believe. I don't get his anti-Palin sentiment. Personally, I find Thatcher and Palin to be quite similar. See and hear for yourself what Hitchens said:

Hero of the left to neocon turncoat, and still battling on: I'm not sure what a legend should look like exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's not this. The paunchy, middle-aged figure who opens the door at 10am has a crust of dried toothpaste around his mouth, an air of bleary dishevelment and the stooped shuffle of a man just out of bed and wishing he'd postponed the appointment to a less ungodly hour... Where is the celebrated rhetorician, famed for speaking in perfect paragraphs sculpted from flawless sentences? Gruff, vague and nursing a cup of tea, he clasps one...

At the age of 15 Peter Hitchens burned his Bible, leaving the Holy Book a “disagreeable, half-charred mess” and the teenager with a sense of anti-climax. It was his “year zero”, and he went on to develop, throughout his late teens and 20s, the typical “enlightened English person’s scorn for faith”, a feeling he characterises by Virginia Woolf’s words upon hearing that T S Eliot had become a Christian: “He may be called dead to us from this day forward.” Christianity was one of the “nursery myths” that the progressive post-war generation had put behind them as they built a...