Hitchens on ecstasy
Here's Christopher Hitchens being slightly less pugnacious than usual:
I'm a materialist...yet there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent, or at its best the Ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what I was talking about. It's in certain music, landscape, certain creative work, without this we really would merely be primates. It's important to appreciate the finesse of that, and religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture.