Christopher was an author and journalist who wrote or edited over 30 books and countless articles (with the New Statesman, The Nation, Vanity Fair and many others) on culture, politics, and literature.
Christopher described himself as an anti-theist who saw all religions as false, harmful and authoritarian. He argued for a naturalistic approach including free expression and scientific discovery and asserted that these provided superior groundings (vs. religion or the supernatural) for ethical codes of conduct. He also advocated separation of church and state. The dictum “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” has become known as Hitchens’s razor.
Although he seemed to grant moral consideration to non-human sentient beings he continued to consume products made from farming animals. In this Atlantic piece he wrote: “the shepherd protects the sheep and the lambs not for their own good but the better to fleece and then to slay them.”; “when I read of the possible annihilation of the elephant or the whale, or the pouring of oven cleaner or cosmetics into the eyes of live kittens, or the close confinement of pigs and calves in lightless pens, I feel myself confronted by human stupidity, which I recognize as an enemy.” and “Like the quality of mercy, the prompting of compassion is not finite, and can be self-replenishing.”
Christopher Hitchens on Wikipedia
2010 Archive of Hitchensweb