reduction

In his book, The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes:

The issue is reduction and how best to avoid it. 

Often our way of understanding or representing ideas or narratives is to reduce them - to simplify them - to make generalisations and abstractions about them.  

One of the meanings of 'comprehend' is to contain or enclose, and sometimes the way we do this is to reduce something. 

Bloom says that we should eschew reduction, because what he is interested in is appreciation (of literature), and reduction diminishes its subject. 

you can see reduction happening in political and ideological discourse and all kinds of media, including books. Even if I agree with side A, in general, and I disagree with side B, I notice that side A will intentionally reduce (and thus misrepresent) the views, ideas, information expressed by side B. It seems to be something we just do. 

We don't see the need to really understand what the other side has to say /// instead, we have to denounce it, dismiss it, and attack it, or use it to attack them. 

As a believer, I'm often struck by how vitriolic books about atheism are, from start to finish. I don't see the point of a lot of those books representative of the 'new atheism'. Because, who is the audience? There are two groups that everyone can be divided into - those who agree with the message of the book and those who don't. Those who agree that God is a delusion, or God is not great, or that faith is, at best, stupid, and at worst malignant and destructive, and those who disagree and believe in God. But you're just not going to win anyone over by telling them how stupid they are or that their cherished beliefs are pernicious and destructive. So, it seems like these books must be written for those who already hold these anti-faith views, but if that's the case, what's the point?

I've got a copy of Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith, and on the front cover, at the very top, is a quote from Richard Dawkins, another famous atheist: 

Read Sam Harris and wake up. 

It's almost funny. I think he's basically addressing an audience of one. As one of the leading atheists he's giving his imprimatur to Harris's book. But it's problematic. Presumably, the people he's saying should wake up are people of faith, but I think that neither his book - The God Delusion - nor Harris's book, are written in a way that is going to win any believer over, and doesn't even really try to. Harris's book is extremely disparaging of Christianity, Islam and their respective scriptures. It's deliberately insulting and sarcastic. I never finished it, just like I didn't finish The God Delusion, even though I began them with great interest in what they had to say. 

I wanted to consider their arguments. But as I read those books, it became very clear that they weren't written for me. For me to accept and consider their arguments, I need to see that they know what they're arguing about. For me, as a believer, to seriously consider an argument against faith, I need the person making that argument to show some understanding and appreciation of what faith is. All I found - this is just my view - in these two books, were misrepresentations about faith and the things associated with it - that faith is irrational and that science provides the kinds of answers we need - that faith and science are opposed to each other. Tell that to the Arabian Muslims who invented algebra and ways of accurately measuring time, and translated the ancient Greek philosophical texts, including those of Aristotle, and made many more discoveries, during the European medieval era, sometimes known as the dark ages. Those advances led to the rennaisance and the scientific revolution and then to modern science. One of the reasons I give that as an example, rather than something related to Christianity, is that I'm a Christian and I want my argument to be rational and based on facts rather than defensive and reactionary. 

To have a dialogue, some kind of understanding or common ground has to be established. If you're not going to give any credit to my view and are going to consistently attack it and try to discredit it from start to finish, it's not just that I refuse to entertain your view, it's that I can't. You're invalidating me and saying I'm stupid - saying that my ideas about reality are ridiculous and delusional - but I'm incapable of taking that view, for obvious reasons. So, I can't hear your argument because it's based on false premises. 

Of course, there are some people who really appreciate books like The End of Faith and The God Delusion. It's interesting to look on goodreads and see how polarised the reception of these books is. There are a lot of 1 star reviews and a lot of 5 star reviews....but I discovered something fascinating when I went through and read some of the 1 star and 5 star reviews. Especially for The End of Faith, a lot of the 1 and 2 star reviews were written, not by believers, as you might expect, but by atheists/ agnostics/ sceptics, who disagreed with different aspects of Sam Harris's approach and his argument. Actually, most if not all of the bad reviews were in that vein....some of them may have been believers, but didn't explicitly say so, but a lot of them explicitly stated they aren't, and the criticism was of the argument made in the book, not the idea that we should question and critique faith, religion and God. 

I couldn't find any five star reviews of the book written by believers, but that's only to be expected.