Christopher Hitchens - We'd Be Better Off Without Religion

I've just learned that the prolific essayist and inimitable public intellectual and agitator Christopher Hitchens has succumbed to the cancer he's been battling over the past year.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Hitchens was a force to be reckoned with. Whatever the subject, at the very least he always had something interesting and thought-provoking to say.

In the following excerpt, Hitchens argues for the motion that "We'd be better off without religion." Now that he's gone, we can think of these ideas and realize that while he was with us, the world was a better place because of his eloquence, his courage, and his wit.

And because it would be totally appropriate on this occasion, I'm stealing the following picture from The Friendly Atheist to make a humble toast to Hitch: