A Reader Profile

Yesterday I visited The Muslim Blogger, a website that helps people in building word-press blogs from an Islamic point of view. As I was browsing through the website I came across a nice article that had tips for blog traffic enhancement. One of the ideas was to develop a reader profile. The idea is based on the observation that as writing for a wider audience is difficult to do as opposed to writing for a single particular reader in mind, one should write for a single ideal reader. This was probably the only idea that particularly caught my attention. Although there are other nice ideas listed there as well. Anyhow, the main benefit of addressing one's ideal reader is that through addressing him/her one addresses the whole of his/her audience. This is quite convenient.

The reason why I liked the idea was that as soon as I read it, I felt that I do have that ideal reader in my mind. That ideal reader in my particular case is nobody other than Sam Harris. I have been reading the work of Sam Harris for a long time now. The main reason why I started rewriting this blog was to be able to argue with him about his criticisms on religion. The idea was to be reasonable and rational. Moreover, by leveraging from the lenses of reason and rationality, the idea was to be able to argue whether he is right about his convictions about religion. Indeed, it is a difficult thing to do as the objections he raises to religious doctrines are quite too many. But I, like so many others, have tried to build the whole argument thing step by step. This blog was an attempt to that. I tried to post things concerning human consciousness and its survival after bodily death, about Islamic perspective on western spiritualism, about existence of God (Allah), and my understanding of free will.

The main objective of writing this blog, however, was not to criticize the work of Sam Harris alone, or anyone else's. One of the reasons was to develop an understanding of how atheists or other people think about Islam. I believe that if Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins can be convinced that atheism is at least wrong, that would be a great job indeed. Generally I like Sam Harris. He writes extremely well and has a very good expression. I am sure he is also a nice man. I also think that at some point in his life he may as well convert to Islam. That would be good news.