Christopher Hitchens

Is there a more succinct indictment of the divine than the observation that "that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"? He was the grand polemicist of the secular world, a man who saw monotheism as the "original totalitarianism" of the universe. He debated the faithful with a glass of scotch in one hand and a history book in the other, exposing the bloody footprints of the "holy" through the centuries. "Religion poisons everything," he argued, from the bedroom to the battlefield. He didn't just disagree with faith; he found it morally repugnant and intellectually lazy. His wit was a scalpel, and he used it to dissect the hubris of those who claimed to speak for the Creator.