Good news folks. God or Godless is now in stock at Amazon and rapidly arriving at other booksellers around the globe. When my last book, The Swedish Atheist, the Scuba Diver, and Other Apologetic Rabbit Trails arrived in the stores I celebrated by finally caving in to persistent requests from myself to be interviewed by me.
Admittedly some people thought it a bit strange to interview oneself, so in honor of the arrival of God or Godless in stores, I have instead agreed to an interview by the Tentative Apologist.
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TP: Randal, thanks for agreeing to do this interview.
RR: Yup.
TP: So I hear God or Godless is out now. Congratulations! That must be very exciting!
RR: Yup.
TP: There are a lot of Christianity/atheist debate books. So why should folks buy your new debate book with John Loftus?
RR: That’s kind of a rude question, isn’t it? Would you ask Bruce Springsteen why anybody should buy his new album?
TP: Sorry, I didn’t mean…
RR: I know what you meant pal. But fine, I’ll play along. Let me note some things that make this book unique and well worth having on your shelf. First, we write in a more relaxed manner than some of those more formal debate books. A bit of humor here and there livens things up.
TP: Funny? If people want to laugh, I would think they should get Seinfeld Season 7, not read an apologetics debate book.
RR: Fair point. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a bit of humor to liven things up. Dessert may be all about sugar, but that means you can’t have a sweet BBQ sauce with your hamburger.
TP: Uh, I think your metaphor went off the rails somewhere. So moving along then, what else?
RR: Okay, another thing that makes the book unique is that it isn’t laden down with one long debate on a single topic like “Does God exist?” or “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” Instead, it focuses on twenty individual debates. And each of them is stripped down to the bare essentials so that an entire debate can be read in twenty or thirty minutes. But they’re also densely packed with arguments and illustrations, so you really get a lot of nutrition packed into each chapter.
TP: Kind of like a PowerBar for the mind?
RR: I don’t know about that. I think you’re better off eating whole foods than a processed tube of paste with infused vitamins in a wrapper.
TP: Okay, a bowl of Quinoa and spinach?
RR: Better, but our chapters are more appetizing.
TP: This keeps getting more interesting. So how do you think the book will be received?
RR: I’m pretty sure my mom will like it.
TP: Who do you think won the debates?
RR (laughs): Depends who you ask, of course. I think I did. John thinks he did. Most of John’s readers at Debunking Christianity will probably think he won. And at least some of my readers will think I won. But my opinion is that in this book the debate over God is carried forward with interesting and thought-provoking arguments on both sides. And that’s a situation where everybody wins.
