The blogosphere and the Web are filled today with memorials to and remembrances of Christopher Hitchens, who died last night in Texas, aged 62. While the cancer that killed him figured prominently in his writing in the last few years of his life, so did the “battle between civilization and theocracy”, a battle that was the them of his 2007 best-seller: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The video, at left, is part of the Google Authors series in which he talks about this theme that religion is just “wish thinking”:
Why don’t we surrender to wish thinking? That poisons everything in my opinion right away to tax the very integrity that we need to conduct the scrupulous inquiries, investigations, experiments and interrogations of evidence that we need to survive and to prosper and to grow. And it’s no coincidence that almost every scientific advance has been made in the teeth of religious opposition.