Why the death of Christopher Hitchens is such sad news.

Today it was announced that Christopher Hitchens, one of the leading lights of New Atheism had died from pneumonia - a complication of the cancer from which he had been suffering. He was obviously a very bright man and possessed a great intellect. He was also a scathing and provocative debater There will be many people who (like myself) disagreed profoundly with him and who will be tempted to celebrate or crow over his passing. PLEASE resist this temptation.

Hitchen's death is sad because he leaves behind a sorrowing, grieving family for whom we all should have compassion. His death is sad because it reminds all of us that whatever intellectual heights we achieve or whatever career success, status or wealth come our way, we are all subject to the inevitable statistic that one in every one person dies.

His death, like every other death, is sad because it reminds that there is something not right about the very existence of death. In the comments on his death on the BBC website many of his fans and followers were using the letters RIP, or talking about the loss of a great soul or even expressing the hope that they might meet again the next time around. No doubt some of this will have been deliberately tongue in cheek but not all of it was. What was certainly not tongue in cheek was the expression by many of a sheer disbelief that their hero was gone. All of this, to me expresses an inability, deep within the human psyche, to reconcile ourselves with death as something normal, natural and part of life. We simply cannot reconcile the thought that humanity is just a random and meaningless colection of atoms with the feelings we experience when someone we love, or by whom we have been influenced, dies. We cannot help but feel that there must be more.

Now, Christopher Hitchens' followers will eventually suppress those feelings and carry on the New Atheist struggle but for those of us who disagreed with him, we should resist the temptation to jump up and down on his death. Instead we should try gently to show those who agree with him that their feelings about the wrongness of death are not, themselves, wrong but point to the fact that their needs to be a better solution than the one Hitchens, Dawkins et al have come up with.

From that point, maybe we can point them to the words of the carols (which Richard Dawkins apparently loves singing as a 'cultural Anglican') which tell them that the solution has come in Christ who was 'born that man no more may die'.

I am deeply saddened that Christopher Hitchens has died from such an awful disease. I did not share his opinions. I believe that much of what he wrote was wrong and often deliberately offensive to people of faith but that only makes me all the more sad, both for him and for his followers. I would encourage as many Christians as possible to express themselves carefully, thoughtfully and compassionately today and to do so for not other reason than the one given by the apostle Peter; 'Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.'