Christopher Hitchens received the “Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year” award on Saturday, partly, I suspect, for staunchly maintaining his rejection of God while staring death in the face.

Fairly recently I had a long discussion with a young friend who has just emerged from years of university theological training. He is a universalist (he wasn’t before entering university), believing that all will eventually be saved: anyone confronted by the living God after death, he maintains, would be sufficiently overwhelmed that they would accept salvation – which would come through Jesus Christ. No amount of protesting that this would remove a person’s God-given free will would budge him.

In the case of a person like Christopher Hitchens who is determined to reject God come what may, universalism definitely can’t work since, for Hitchens, being compelled to inhabit heaven with God would be… hell.

From here:

During the convention, Dawkins praised Hitchens for his continuance of atheism even in the face of death and for proving that there were indeed, “atheists in foxholes,”….

[….]

“We have the same job we always had,” he told the crowd, “to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”

If, as Hitchens says, there is no absolute truth then the rest of what he had to say in that last paragraph can’t be absolutely true, including the very next thing he says: there is no supreme leader.