Christopher Hitchens is dead.

"The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth…You can't say…that I have to say I'm terribly sorry he's dead…because I'm not. I think we have been rid of an extremely dangerous demagogue who lived by hatred of others, and prejudice…If you gave him an enema, you could have buried him in a matchbox."

Now, before you start filling my Inbox with venomous emails, these are not my words on the death of Christopher Hitchens, but his words on the death of Jerry Falwell. Undoubtedly, any contemporary Christian would be excoriated for saying such things about Hitchens' death, but these crass words on Falwell's death only added to the celebrity of Christopher Hitchens.

I actually was sorry to hear of Hitchens' death. I'll be honest enough to admit that I won't miss his spewing of sacrilege and ridiculing of Christians as rubes and nut cases, but I do regret to hear of anyone slipping out of this world unprepared for the next. Oh, I know that saying such a thing will bring down on me the ire of the new atheists, who lionized Hitchens, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, as their "Four Horsemen."

How dare I besmirch the tragic death of this superior intellect by weeping over what he had personally dismissed as the mere delusion of dimwitted people; namely, the forfeiture of his immortal soul? Yet, I think these new atheists doth protest too much. They are obsessed with a subject to which they deny all substance. They remind me of Hughes Mearns well-know rhyme:

"Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn't there

He wasn't there again today

Oh, how I wish he'd go away."

If God isn't there, why are atheists so determined and devoted to making Him go away? For example, why did the smug Hitchens feel the need to assure atheism's rank and file that any news of a death bed conversion on his part should be chalked up to cancer or chemo getting to his brain? Was he fearful that in the face of eternity he might apostatize from his infidelity and grasp for faith with his dying breath? Granted, he may have simply wanted to safeguard himself from being posthumously misrepresented as another great infidel in Heaven, like Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. Still, in his death, like in his life, he was found to be wishing away the God who isn't there.

There is one thing I'll have to say for Christopher Hitchens, in spite of his militant atheism, which was clearly spelled out in his book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he did possess a much sounder theology than the vast majority of confessing Christians today. For instance, consider the following exchange which took place during an interview of Hitchens by a Unitarian minister named Marilyn Sewell:

Sewell: "The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the Scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?"

Hitchens: "I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian."

Isn't it interesting, not to mention sad and most distressing, that the late atheist, Christopher Hitchens, understood the heart and soul of the Christian faith far better than most breathing confessors of Christ today? As Hitchens himself understood, and now tragically knows for certain, what one believes about Jesus Christ is the crux of the whole matter!

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