Prolific author and journalist Christopher Hitchens on how his struggle with cancer has affected his personal views on the question of an afterlife. Hitchens is a lifelong atheist and his views on religion are further discussed in his bestselling book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister: more like black magic. With all this continual prayer, why no result? Why did I have to keep saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner? Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic? These faltering and childish objections are, I have since discovered, extremely common-place, partly because no religion can meet them with any satisfactory answer.

—Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.