Goodnight, Mr. Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was a strong voice in favour of reason and sanity. Whilst I disagreed with some of his views, I recognise that the world is lessened by his passing. Raise a glass to his memory, and don't cheapen his life by using meaningless platitudes to lessen the impact of his death.

I hope he would have approved of this.

And I think we can all rest assured he'd have approved of this:

As with most breaking news these days, I found out about his death from Twitter. I checked my Twitter feed as I got up at about 6am. A few people that I follow were already awake and discussing it. As a mark of respect, many of those tweets were tagged with the name of Hitchens’ best known book “God Is Not Great“. And then more and more people started to do that. And before too long, the hashtag #GodIsNotGreat was listed as one of Twitters worldwide trending topics. At which point it started to go a bit weird.

 All around the world religious people who knew nothing at all about Christopher Hitchens, his books or his death were looking at Twitter and seeing the tag #GodIsNotGreat. And that annoyed many of them immensely.

Thanks to Davblog for posting the story.