Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Christopher Hitchens face off at Cooper Union on September 16, 2010. Photographs by Anthony Geathers.

Christopher Hitchens, looking all too svelte in his tan suit, his scalp gleaming under the lights, took to the stage at Cooper Union last night to argue against the existence of an afterlife, only to have his adversary, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, tell him he was destined for eternal happiness—because of his support for the war in Iraq, “because of his stand against Halabja” (where Saddam gassed 5,000 Kurds). “For this, I got on the shuttle?” Hitchens exclaimed, referring to the short flight to New York from his home city of Washington, D.C.

In an effort to mix things up a bit, Hitchens said the afterlife was “a verdict against which there is no appeal,” and called the Orthodox Boteach a “Jewish secularist,” and Pope Benedict an “overdressed little ponce.” As an example of what draws people to religion, Hitchens cited Louis Farrahkan’s exhortation at Madison Square Garden in the mid-1980s: “Remember, Jews, when God puts you in the ovens, it’s forever.” He also said, “call someone an imam, a priest, a reverend—look at the Reverend Al—and there’s nothing you can’t get away with.” The audience, which seemed to have come to see Hitchens and to wish him well in his ongoing battle against esophageal cancer—”You’re looking great, Hitch,” one questioner said—erupted in the biggest applause of the night.

Boteach, a syndicated columnist and the author of Kosher Sex, touts himself as “one of the world’s leading relationship experts,” and has been a guest on The View. (Hitchens called him furry—in fondness, it seemed—more than once.) Early on, Hitchens fretted as he reached for his whiskey, “Don’t make me suspect that you’re sparing me.”

Alas, Shmuley gave the appearance of pulling punches. His only real salvo came when he called on Hitchens to account for the crimes of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. “Secular atheism,” the rabbi said, “has killed more people than all religions combined.”

This provoked the only bearish swipe of the night, as Hitchens pointed to the Nazis’s claim that their “work on the Jews was done on the word of god. The Nazi soldiers had it inscribed on their belt buckles: Gott Mit Uns. With God on our side.” After Boteach graciously conceded the point, Hitchens sat back as if he had just finished lunch. “Now you know how rude I can be,” said the God Is Not Great author (and Vanity Fair columnist), who in the past has given audiences the middle finger and compared them to zoo animals.

But Hitchens became furry himself when asked by the moderator Lisa Oz if he believed in the soul. “It’s like reducing love to sex,” he said. “Not that we haven’t all tried. All I can say is that it is the phenomenon we can’t quite see, but you can’t do without it.”

Naomi Wolfe was the first at the microphone with a question about “felt perception,” asking Hitchens what he thought of selecting elements from various religions to come up with a personal doctrine. Hitchens replied that such an approach was like holy water: “it won’t help you, but it won’t hurt you either.” Even so, Hitchens said, “I don’t want to hear about your religion. Keep it to yourself. By all means, employ the mush solution, because it’s all mush to begin with.”

Next month at the 92nd Street Y, Hitchens faces Tariq Ramadan to debate the question “Is Islam a religion of peace?” Ramadan, who was denied entry to the United States under an anti-terrorism law by the Bush State Department (the decision was overturned on appeal last year), may not go for the jugular, but he certainly won’t be congratulating Hitchens on his role in liberating Iraq.

Related: “Unanswerable Prayers” by Christopher Hitchens (October 2010)