I made a quick note on the passing of Christopher Hitchens at Slacktivist.
...."Hitch was a leftist who shared with the modern US right a Romantic ideal of belief. The notion that to sincerely believe a thing at all must necessarily inspire a lust to fight for and impose that belief on others. Those who are unable to comprehend the man must understand this. It is why an atheistic radical was able to support the imperialism of Gulf War II, how a man who was a forceful supporter of Palestinian statehood and close friend to several Mid-Eastern intellectuals was able to take the side of paternalism and forced assimilation in the French burqa controversy.
Most self-described American liberals are basically utilitarians. Our beliefs exist as polite and modest proposals for making life better, not as vehicles for grasping the infinite through holy struggle. We therefore see no problem with believing that secularism and rationalism are good things on the one hand while on the other hand believing that it is wrong to force these things upon others. Christopher Hitchens was very, very, straightforward in his belief that such a position was horseshit; that anyone who claimed to hold it must be both a liar and a coward."
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