I think if you do your homework, you can bring it off. It's a matter of eventually coming to believe your own unbelievable premise. The people for whom Towing Jehovah works, take it seriously. They have to think through their own image of God and then compare it to this sort of overtly cartoonish image of God - this old man with a beard out of the Sistine Chapel painting by Michelangelo. I'm inviting the reader to do that, and I'm very serious in that invitation.
Satire is deadly serious.
It's not to be confused with burlesque or parody or Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy or anything for a laugh mode. It's a very angry mode, and very consistent in what it is trying to say. If I do a lot of research and get certain technical details right, details about piloting ships and how supertankers work, I think I can win the reader over. There's a little bit of me in each character. My previous novel, Only Begotten Daughter , about Jesus Christ's divine half-sister, was kind of autobiographical.