Christopher Hitchens was a British-American author, journalist and literary critic. He was a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets.

Hitchens was also a political activist, whose best-selling books, flamboyance and erudition made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits.

An outspoken atheist and antitheist, Hitchens described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. His 2007 best-selling book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything suggests that organized religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”

“If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”