By Tom Chivers in Telegraph
There are no atheists in foxholes, goes the old saw. Well, it’s not true, as Christopher Hitchens – a man of principle to the last – demonstrated
Many of his adversaries – and there were many; he was not one for pacifying platitudes – had expressed a hope or an expectation that this most trenchant of unbelievers would repent on his deathbed. His final written work, about Nietzsche’s fatuous aphorism “What does not kill me makes me stronger” and how it was demonstrably untrue, had inspired one, Mark Judge of the Daily Caller, to wonder whether it had finally come. But as he himself said in the last year or so of his life, any expression of faith which might issue from his dying body (“including but not limited to, ‘I accept Jesus as my lord and savior,’ or, ‘Muhammad, peace be unto him, is the messenger of God,’ or, ‘the Lubavitcher rebbe is the true messiah and currently living in Brooklyn,'” as his friend Jeffrey Goldberg put it in The Atlantic) would not be coming from a Christopher Hitchens that Christopher Hitchens would recognise: “The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain. I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognisable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark.”
Christopher Hitchens was a man who had a lot of impact – he made us all think It did not matter if you agreed with him or not (believers and non-believers). I admired his consistency to his principles even as he faced death.