Michael Gerson of PostPartisan also says he sparred a bit with Christopher Hitchens, though he is sure Hitchens had worthier opponents, and one larger battle:

Hitchens picked big fights, including a running rumble with God. He recognized that there is one argument worth having about religion: Is it true or false? The rest is sociology. Hitchens thought religion to be false and dangerous, but not trivial. This may help to explain the affinity of many believers for the world’s most articulate unbeliever. Hitchens took the largest questions seriously.

He also took human dignity seriously. Hitchens’s defining public trait was the offense he took at injustice. And he was usually offended on behalf of persecuted and forgotten people. I found this a moral example.

Likewise, Susan Jacoby of The Spirited Atheist found Hitchens’s columns from the last year of his life to be a great example, and a true voice to the subject of living with a mortal illness:

What I admire, as an atheist, about these columns is their unsparingly unsentimental examination of the process of fighting a disease that you know is going to consume you. Every well-known person who has ever challenged religious orthodoxy — Voltaire, Paine, Robert Ingersoll — has engendered an afterlife of lies in which believers assert that the “infidel” repented and accepted God on his deathbed. Christopher Hitchens made sure that would not happen to him, and in doing so he has left a model record of pain and reason, as opposed to the nonsense about eternal life that we get from religious people, who, mirabile dictu, fight just as hard as anyone else not to leave this vale of tears.