In his 2010 religion debate with Tony Blair, roughly a year before his untimely death, Christopher Hitchens decided to address what he said was most "twisted and immoral in the faith mentality, its essential fanaticism, its consideration of the human being as a raw material, and its fantasy of purity." The debate extended the hardline he adopted in his 2007 best-seller "God Is Not Great," that religion -- a "malignant force" -- "poisons everything."
With the New York Times Book Review and others calling the polemic "an all-out attack on all aspects of religion," one might assume Hitchens would've been similarly uncompromising about agnosticism as failing to reach his own level of certainty in "antitheism," his preferred self-description. Yet, of the seven brief references to agnosticism that appear in "God Is Not Great," all are unmistakably supportive. What's more, Hitchens's book did something increasingly rare among atheists and critics of religion: whenever possible, it grouped agnostics with atheists and freethinkers, as allies with shared arguments against monotheism, zealotry and fundamentalism.
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