10 years ago--the death of "New Atheist" Christopher Hitchens

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Psalms 14:1a (also Psalms 53:1a)

On December 15, 2011, British-born journalist Christoper Hitchens died of pneumonia at the age of 62. Mr. Hitchens was a Marxist and socialist who wrote for various magazines and newspapers in a career spanning 40 years. He moved to the United States in 1981 as part of an editor exchange program between the New Statesman and The Nation, and eventually became an American citizen in 2007. Mr. Hitchens was critical of American foreign policy in the 1980s, but broke with most leftist opinion in the 2000s when he supported the American war in Iraq. He also broke with the left when he criticized U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Hitchens was, with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, one of the "Four Horsemen" of the New Atheist movement in the mid-late 2000s, expressing his views in his book God is Not Great (2007). As early as 2008, Vox Day, blogger and author of The Irrational Atheist (2014), was writing that the New Atheist movement had already peaked. In 2010, Mr. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which likely resulted from decades of heavy smoking and drinking. He wrote essays on cancer, which were published as the book Mortality (2012) after his death.

The best comment on the death of an atheist--if one is to look at it from a purely materialistic point of view--that I've seen is from Mr. Day, on December 16, 2011:

The conglomeration of atoms that were, for a very brief moment in history, collectively known by the name Christopher Hitchens, have begun to disperse. The universe continues as before, uncaring and unaware.