Arvin Temkar on Christopher Hitchens

If there were an appropriate time for Christopher Hitchens, outspoken author and atheist, to make good with god, it would have been just before he died Thursday. But he would not repent. Hitch, as he was known by admirers, had long offered a voice of reason in a world awash with violence and political turmoil. His steadfast voice was shaken by advanced esophageal cancer in the summer of 2010. This spring he wrote that he could no longer speak. He died of pneumonia, a complication of the cancer, at the age of 62. But even in the face of death the polemicist scorned the afterlife. His voice had gone temporarily, but he did not go quietly. Known for his raucous personality, his excessive drinking and smoking, and his sharp tongue, Hitchens had a distinguished career as a polemicist, journalist, and public intellectual. Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, he attended Oxford University, where he joined the leftist movements of the sixties. He began his journalism career as a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, and moved on to the British leftist magazine the New Statesman. When he emigrated to the United States in the early eighties, he wrote for The Nation, then became a U.S. citizen in 2007 holding dual citizenship with the United Kingdom. Formerly a "darling of the left," Hitchens fell from grace after supporting the Iraq war in 2003. The divisive author's stances made him as many enemies as friends. One Salon.com writer wrote that Hitchens should not be canonized in the coming days, but outed for his flaws: "in addition to being a zingy writer and masterful debater, he was also a bellicose warmongering misogynist." Hitchens might have appreciated such bluntness. Indeed articles are cropping up all over, not eulogizing, but criticizing the author in a vein reminiscent of his own excoriating profiles. He would have had it no other way, critics say. He who lived by the sword must die by it too. In his columns in Vanity Fair and Slate magazine Hitchens routinely defied convention. No matter the topic, be it politics or religion, his writing was masterful and biting, often to the point of clear insult. He famously called Mother Teresa a "fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," condemning her in his 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice for promoting religious doctrine over personal liberty. The 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, continued that line of thought, laying out several arguments on why the world would be better off without religion. Chapter titles include: "Religion Kills," and "Is Religion Child Abuse?" Wrote Hitchens: "The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals." As tough as his writing was his personality: a hard-bitten, hard-living journalist, he once allowed himself to be waterboarded on camera for Vanity Fair to see if it really is torture. It is, he concluded. His friend, novelist Martin Amis, wrote that "he's one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has ever seen." "Christopher talks not only in complete sentences but in complete paragraphs," wrote Amis. A New Yorker profile of Hitchens in 2006 revealed that he had only recently quit the habit of smoking in the shower. After his diagnosis, he wrote in his Vanity Fair column that he had been "knowingly burning the candle at both ends, and finding that it often gives a lovely light." Hitchens retained his composure under fire, writing frankly about his cancer treatments in Vanity Fair. And the stubborn atheist in the foxhole refused to accept god at the last minute. Some Christians deemed Hitchens' cancer a mighty blow from god- punishment for years of spewing heresies. But he dismissed the idea. Instead of speaking at the American Atheist conference, his voice gone at the time, he wrote a letter encouraging his peers to remain united and carry on the "secular revolution" People called for Hitchens to be "saved." He may very well have been. But if he was, he'd thank the miracle of science, not god. Arvin Temkar is a journalist. His work can be found in Grist.org, New York Press, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications.