Newly naturalized Christopher Hitchens did his version of a homily for the Rev. Jerry Falwell on last night's Anderson Cooper 360. Joining Cooper from Raleigh, N.C., the atheist author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything figuratively boogied on Falwell's barely cold corpse. Watch the video above; highlights from the transcript are after the jump ...

• Cooper: Christopher, I'm not sure if you believe in heaven, but, if you do, do you think Jerry Falwell is in it?
Hitchens: No. And I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to.

• Hitchens: "The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11 were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification? People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup."

• Hitchens: "...[T]he country suffers, to a considerable extent, from paying too much, by way of compliment, to anyone who can describe themselves as a person of faith: Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Chaucerian frauds, people who are simply pickpockets..."

• Cooper: Do you believe he believed what he spoke?
Hitchens: Of course not. He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, I have got away with it again.
Cooper: You think he was a complete fraud, really?
Hitchens: Yes.
Cooper: You don't believe that, I mean, in his reading of the Bible, you don't think he was sincere in his—whether you agree or not with his reading of the Bible—you don't think he was sincere in what he spoke?
Hitchens: No. I think he was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud. And I think, if he read the Bible at all—and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book of—at all—that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way.

Cooper thanked Hitchens, reminded the audience that he's all about diverse opinions, then ended the segment on this note: "Coming up, we are going to look at Jerry Falwell's war on homosexuality, blaming gays and lesbians for 9/11, among other things, [he] even warned about the Teletubbies, as we mentioned. What was his problem with Tinky-Winky? Find out next on 360."

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