To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow-acting suicide-murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven.

He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. Rabbi David Wolpe, author of Why Faith Matters and the leader of a major congregation in Los Angeles, said the same.

Dr Kenneth Rooney is lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland.

Hitchens was overwhelmed by the idea of his death; it’s true that most people don’t think about mortality until they absolutely must. He dispatches the illusion that "whatever does not kill me makes me stronger" for the nonsense it is. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. Many of us ponder this question at one point or another but it never weighs onyour mind as heavily as when you have a terminal diagnosis.If anything, he felt that doing so would likely make him a shallow and insincere person on a number of levels. A different secular problem also occurs to me: What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered?

When he was robbed of the ability to speak, he suddenly felt as though he had suffered a crisis of identity. He decided that he wanted to push past the awkwardnessand confront the reality of what was happening to him. Two years later, after a gruelling schedule of treatment, she flew in a glider for the first time and found a passion which showed her a way to live again.You might be familiar with Nietzsche’s famous saying that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That’s how Hitchens discovered that encouraging someone with the phrase “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” isn’t always helpful. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. Although people often forget to attribute it to Nietzsche, this phrase has become inexorably intertwined in popular culture and is often depicted in popular songs, poems, and wearable art. But his erudite manner in the way he strings sentences, the rapidity and beauty of his ability to talk in paragraphs, would stand him in good stead in the court room.