christopher hitchens: 'you have to choose your future regrets'

'"even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. all you can show is how you dealt with various hands."'

and

'hitchens dislikes the "new atheist" title. "it isn't really new," he says, "except it coincides with huge advances made in the natural sciences. and there's been an unusually violent challenge to pluralist values by the supporters of at least one monotheism apologised for quite often by the sympathisers of others. then they say we're fundamentalists. a stupid idea like that is hard to kill because any moron can learn it in 10 seconds and repeat it as if for the first time. but since there isn't a single position that any of us holds on anything that depends upon an assertion that can't be challenged, i guess that will die out or they'll get bored of it."

as for the notion that his brand of atheism is reductive or joyless, it's religion, he contests, that is "cosmically hopeless, as is all the related masochism that goes with it – you've got to spend your entire life making up for the vermin you are. what is that if not degrading? we don't do that to people. we say you may as well know you're a primate, but take heart, primates are capable of great things."'


... at the guardian