No Sex Please, We’re Atheists
Religious fundamentalists think we’re a bunch of shameless libertines. If only that were true.
I’ve long been a fan of the late Christopher Hitchens, but it wasn’t until recently when I delved deep into his essay collection Arguably, published three months before his death in September 2010, that I truly came to realize what the world had lost upon his shedding of his mortal coil.
Those of my generation and younger know Hitch mainly as one of the so-called “four horsemen” of the new atheist apocalypse (or non-apologist as fellow nouveau-skeptic Michael Shermer called the phenomenon) together with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Dan Dennett, and remain largely oblivious to his long career as a bad-boy foreign correspondent, literary critic, and columnist for the likes of Vanity Fair and New Statesman.
The man who famously had himself subjected to waterboarding during the Bush II era so as to determine whether or not it constituted torture (spoiler alert: yes, it did) was also, in another life, a daredevil Trotskyite journalist who interviewed Latin American despots, got himself locked up in communist Czechoslovakia, and was one of the earliest and most most vocal Cassandras about the incipient post-Cold War menace to freedom of expression presented by religious (and particularly Islamic) extremism stemming from the 1989 fatwa against his…
