In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

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Ross Douthat, in full display of the kind of soft-headed arrogance that so easily passes for conservative intellectualism, declaring Christopher Hitchens to be “the believer’s atheist”.

I have no clue how Hitchens would himself have responded but as a non-believer who has found some measure of comfort in his (and Dawkins’s and Dennett’s and Harris’s) writing, I find it to be in poor taste to say the least, not to mention simply offensive to anyone with a working capacity to think intelligently. Of course Hitchens lived an absolutely full life – he plainly and eloquently believed this was his only chance and that wasting it on some hope of an ill-defined (and utterly boring) afterlife was antithetical to everything he stood for.

And why are “rigorous atheists” and agnostics the only ones who have to suffer such indignity when they pass? Why is the perfectly reasonable question of “when stripped of actual fairy tales and pre-civilization-utopian happy talk, rigorous Catholicism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, inevitably to the terrible conclusion that free will is an illusion of an unloving god” never asked so pointedly of the pious?