Christopher Hitchens and John Waters, two furiously tireless polemicists, positively thrive on spreading irritation about the place. At the Gate Theatre in Dublin last night an eager audience relished the opportunity to see the writers work their talent for vexation on one another.
The subject under discussion was the latest book by Hitchens, God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion.
The bibulous English author, a round-faced recovering Marxist who recently appalled his former comrades by supporting the Iraq War, maintains that faith distorts young minds, fosters division and inhibits scientific advance.
The bearded Waters, whose superficial resemblance to an Old Testament prophet suited the occasion nicely, has used his Irish Times column to decry the advance of "aggressive secularism" throughout the western world. His next book is to be titled Lapsed Agnostic.
The organisers of the Dublin Writers Festival, sponsor of the event, surely hoped they had the literary equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship on their hands.
The stage of the theatre, decorated for the Gate's production of Sweeney Todd, might have been specifically designed to allow the easy run-off of blood and viscera.
The debate began in civil enough fashion. Hitchens compared the Christian afterlife to a kind of celestial North Korea - endless surveillance, endless praise for the great leader - and defied the audience to construct a commendable ethical statement that could not have been devised by a person of no faith.
Waters accepted that atheists could live perfectly moral lives, but wondered if the development of secular humanism would have been possible without the ethical foundations laid down by the Christian church. "Christianity has asked questions and atheists are now breathing in the same air," he said.
After delivering their opening statements from a raised lectern at the rear of the stage - the similarity to a pulpit was striking - the two men sat either side of Brenda Power, the moderator, and began disagreeing with one another in irritatingly reasonable fashion.
Those who had come hoping to see the two men beat each other around the head with rhetorical pickaxe handles appeared to be facing disappointment. Waters acknowledged that Hitchens's book was worth reading. Hitchens accepted that one of Waters's questions was worth asking.
As the debate progressed, however, the inherent intellectual arrogance one expects from a Balliol College, Oxford graduate began showing itself in Hitchens's aspect and delivery.
"You wear the medals of your own defeat," the Englishman snapped, referring to Waters's reluctance to accept Catholic doctrine wholesale.
An hour into the conversation, Waters's googlies all supposedly dispatched to the boundary, Christopher Hitchens was leaning back in his seat glancing defiantly into the audience.
"Bring it on. Bring it on," he didn't quite say.
It was at this point that things began to turn satisfactorily nasty.
Hitchens's attitude towards American foreign policy was always likely to cause ructions in - this being that sort of affair - a disproportionately liberal audience.
Sure enough, one of the first questions from the floor began with a gruff assertion that Hitchens had "abandoned all his cherished beliefs" and went on to wonder if he still felt himself a moral being.
Adopting the aspect you might see on a greedy diner who, equipped with pliers and poking tools, has just discovered a lobster on his plate, Hitchens peered into the gloom beyond the stage lights.
"I can't see you," he said. "But you sound irritating. I just wonder if you are as annoying as you sound."
"That is the answer of a scoundrel," his accuser replied.
Brenda made an attempt to make something reasonable of the question, but Hitchens, who drank only water throughout, was having none of it.
"F . . . off! F . . . off!" he drawled at the questioner. The microphone moved elsewhere.
After a few more tense exchanges, the audience was set free to discuss whether there had been a winner.
By this writer's reckoning, Hitchens received at least three more outbursts of spontaneous applause than did Waters.
Mind you, the pious are known for their meekness. To paraphrase a piece of Catholic sophistry from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, perhaps they were all clapping spiritually.
