What the man meant to me.

So like I said in yesterdays post, I wanted to share what Christopher Hitchens meant to me. Here goes.

Christmas day 2007 (I believe that was the year, I'm never good at remembering dates and such.) I got a book as a present from my mother. The book was titled, "God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything. Reading the cover and the first few sentences I became horribly exited, this looked like the exact thing I was looking for. At this point I had definitely been on the path to atheism for a while. I started questioning the faith I was raised in, Lutheranism, since I was around seven or eight or so, and I existed on a healthy diet of George Carlin.

Reading that book over the next few days I learned a lot. I learned that it wasn't just Christianity that was crazy and harmful. I learned for every contradiction in the bible, there were hundreds of people dying. I learned, like the title suggested, just how poisonous religion can be. He also taught me that hate is a powerful thing that I shouldn't hide or be afraid of, but to embrace and use as a tool. To this day my mother fights me on this, insisting that not every religious person is bad and worth the hate I feel. "It's not the people mom, it's the religion." She told me I should honor his death my trying to help continue his work which I responded, "Then I need to hate mom, that's what he would have done."

I could never be Hitchens and I don't know if anyone else could be, but him dying makes me want to try somehow to at least aspire to be as awesome as he could be, and maybe then some.