As I mentioned in that earlier post, there was another publisher interested in THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST. Apparently they were a bit more interested than I’d previously been led to understand. I sent them the proposal after receiving the notice of rejection from the first publisher, and got a telephone call from an editor yesterday evening, followed an hour later by a book contract from the publisher.
It’s an interesting situation, because the publisher is a secular one and the editor is an atheist. Nevertheless, he informed me the book appealed to him because he found the arguments contra Dawkins and Harris presented in the sample chapters to be not so much convincing as conclusive. Which would appear to be a good sign.
But keep in mind that the book isn’t a conventional apology, it’s a salvo returning fire in the rhetorical war declared by Sam and Dick, making a reason-based case regarding modern society’s need for religion and the right of the religious faithful to command respect for their faith within it.
And while the book’s publisher isn’t an international conglomerate like the first one, they’re a respected one with solid distribution and the arrangement we’re in the process of working out may well prove to be a much better setup for me given my plethora of idiosyncracies. The book will be published in hardcover and it may even be available by the end of the year, although we haven’t decided upon a release date yet.
I’m interested in knowing if any of you might like to try to shoot holes in some of the more controversial chapters once they are ready. If you’d like to do that and are willing to hammer on a single chapter in no small degree of detail, let me know. I’m thinking particularly of folks like JQP, who aren’t religious and have the ability to make use of their skepticism without letting it rule them when examining the strength of a countervailing logic.
UPDATE: it’s been decided and the release date will be December.