From here:

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition [sic]. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

…. And don’t keep the faith.

But, of course, Hitchens is keeping the faith:

Faith that a dying organism can bolster the immunity of a randomly assembled conglomeration of molecules – otherwise known as comrades – to a belief in the transcendence which alone offers a remedy for the despair inherent in mortality.

Faith that he, Hitchens is right, that his mind, body, rationality, faculties and voice are subject to no other forces than the material.

Faith that the reasoning abilities he is so proud of, even though they are nothing but the flotsam of a chaotic universe, are, for a mysterious reason known only to himself, more trustworthy than those of Mother Teresa – a creation of the same primordial pandemonium – someone who has earned Hitchens’ undisguised scorn.

Faith that a trust in nothingness is somehow nobler than trust in a Creator.

Faith that the best efforts of medical science to prolong the time that a person struts and frets his hour upon the stage is of consequence when set against eternity.

A wonderful illustration of Psalm 14:1.