It’s a very nasty little history… They’ve even tried it on me, when I’ve had not the vinegar I’d like to have had, in a hospital bed. People claim that Darwin had a deathbed recantation.
“It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people whom you don’t know, but who are unbelievers, and say: ‘Now are you going to change your mind?’ … As you know, there’s a long history of fraud about this. In the months before he died, Hitchens repeatedly and emphatically warned that claims like Taunton’s would be forthcoming and should be disbelieved. David Horowitz, who knew Hitchens over a lifetime, called it “a literary gem, which no honest reader could mistake for an ideological tract.” The religion column of the New York Times publicized Taunton’s claim in a headline: “Christopher Hitchens Was Shaky in His Atheism, New Book Suggests.” Chris Matthews, who frequently hosted Hitchens on MSNBC, interviewed Taunton and urged all his viewers to read his “beautifully written” book. The book has won much attention and some praise. Taunton directed Hitchens’s attention to the Gospelist’s promise of eternal life, which Hitchens-according to Taunton-described as “not without its appeal to a dying man.” During the longer of those drives (13 hours from Hitchens’s home in Washington, D.C., to Taunton’s in Birmingham, Alabama), the two men read aloud and discussed the Gospel of St. Taunton based this astounding claim on two conversations with Hitchens during car drives to speaking events sponsored by Taunton’s foundation.
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