Cancer may have robbed Christopher Hitchens of much of his hair. But no one could think it had taken any of his legendary knack for getting straight to the point.

“How am I? I am dying,” he says as an opener to a conversation with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, recorded at his own home in Washington DC with his “dearest friend” Martin Amis, the novelist, more or less ambling into view midway through it, a bottle of beer in hand. “Everybody is, but the process has suddenly accelerated on me.”

And in spite of the position he finds himself in, Hitchens sounds no less intellectually rigorous. To the question that each interviewer was bound to ask an orthodox atheist such as himself – is this the time to reconsider your views on God? – he offers a categorical reply: no.

More people, he reports, are praying for his recovery than for his demise. Others are praying for him to see the light and save himself. He tells Anderson Cooper in the CNN clip that there is one web page that has identified 20 September as “Pray for Hitchens Day”. But when prodded by both Cooper and Goldberg on the matter of his perhaps changing his mind on the absence or otherwise of an Almighty, he seizes the opportunity to make clear that no such thing is in the offing. If such a thing were to happen it would be because the illness had rendered him demented.

Indeed, should any of us hear closer to the time – Hitchens says he will be lucky to see another five years – that he has uttered some deathbed words to the effect that he accepting God’s existence, we should not believe it. “The faithful love to spread these rumours,” he told Cooper, adding that he will not be doing “such a pathetic thing”.

Continues: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/hitchens-were-all-dying-with-me-its-accelerated-2050136.html