Newest Hitchens available here.

A great end paragraph:

But in 1914, Saki surprised all his elite admirers. His reasons for insisting on signing up for the trenches, when he was easily old enough to evade that fate, were almost comically reactionary. Enraged by the antimilitarist left that thought socialism preferable to world war, he argued in effect that even world war was preferable to socialism. Yet he declined any offer of an officer’s commission, insisted on serving in the ranks, appeared to forget all his previous affectations about hollandaise dressing and the loving preparations of wine and cheese, and was so reduced by front-line conditions of wounds and illness that he grew a moustache to conceal the loss of most of his top teeth. He carried on writing, though chiefly about the interesting survival of wildlife in the no-man’s-land of the Western Front, and he repeatedly sought positions on the front line. In November 1916, near the village of Beaumont-Hamel on the river Somme, he found what it is quite thinkable that he had been looking for all along. On the verge of a crater, during an interval of combat, he was heard to shout “Put that bloody cigarette out!” before succumbing to the bullet of a German sniper who had been trained to look for such tell-tale signals. In that “vanished puff of cigarette smoke” or, if you prefer, his image of a dissolved bubble of effervescence, there died someone who had finally come to decide that other people were worth fighting for after all.

Me with a group of people. A confused discussion ensues about spirituality and religion where no one understands the point that anyone else is trying to make. One member of group relates a story about a person they know who recently attended an hour long prayer session at their Church for the benefit of the people of China and Burma. Said person stated that they didn’t understand how people could think that this would help and that maybe an hour doing fundraising might have been better.

I made the point that I didn’t understand how people could want to pray to a God who required people to pray to Him before He got off His arse and did something.

This earned me the wrath of someone in the group.

It was demanded of me that if people want to pray, or go to Church, or believe in God then what had that got to do with me? If people think that by praying to their God they are being helpful then that is up to them. What have people’s religious belief and practice got to do with me? It’s harmless and nothing at all to do with me or anyone else .

However, I think it has got something to do with me, and everyone else, when a bill passing through the Commons is threatened because of some people’s religious beliefs. I think it has got something to do with me, and everyone else, when a Church dictates what MPs should and should not vote for. I think it has got something to do with me, and everyone else, when religion seeks to intrude upon democratic process.

With the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill being debated in the Commons this coming week, this really was not the time for someone to tell me that I can’t have an opinion on the religious, when the religious are attempting to impose the consequences of their ‘opinons’ on everyone else.

As this someone was to discover.