While originally focusing on relativist postmodern targets, um, topics, she also has began to address material from the religious crowd (both foreign and domestic). I suspect she may be the most famous female atheist.
You can check out some of the topics she skewers here. This page is where you find the daily postings, with this description:
Our short and pithy observations on the passing scene as it relates to the mission of Butterflies and Wheels. Woolly-headed or razor-sharp comments in the media, anti-rationalist rhetoric in books or magazines or overheard on the bus, it's all grist to our mill. And sometimes we will hold forth on the basis of no inspiration at all beyond what happens to occur to us.Free Thinker interviews her here. Some thoughts below the quote.
The Freethinker: B&W’s tagline is “Fighting fashionable nonsense”, a reference to the anti-science, relativist thinking prevalent in academia and a certain section of the left. But half the website - and more than half of the blog - is concerned with the idiocies and contradictions of organised religion. Is this a deliberate shift of focus? Or are the two targets closely related?
Ophelia Benson: It’s not exactly a deliberate shift of focus in the sense of having been decided in advance; it was more of an evolution. I think the two targets are closely related, in various ways – they both have a willful, chosen quality that interests me. Just getting things wrong is one thing, but being deliberately credulous is another. It’s not always possible to know which is which, of course, but there are some obvious markers. Making a virtue of faith and a vice of reason is one; talking pityingly about the ‘reality-based community’ is kind of a give-away. I’m interested by people who in some sense ought to know better, deciding to believe things for no very good reason and then making careers out of defending these not very well-warranted beliefs. In that sense popes and postmodernists have a lot in common.
More specifically, I kept finding more and more material about cultural relativism and especially about the tension between cultural relativism and women’s rights, and that subject is inseparable from religion. What cultural relativism turns out to mean, nearly all the time, is being protective of religion at the expense of women’s rights. The more I bumped up against irritating sentimental blather about ‘faith communities’ when the faith communities in question seemed to consist entirely of men, the more worthwhile it seemed to point out that the truth claims that underpin ‘faith communities’ are not based on much of anything. Once I started doing that, it became something like a continuing investigation. I’m still interested – fascinated, really – by the fact that people like to claim that grown-up religions are sophisticated and reasonable, when day after day month after month the top clerics in the mainstream religions publish articles in newspapers and say things on tv and radio that are… not well reasoned. I’m still waiting to see something impressive and convincing from a priest or an imam or an apologist. I keep being surprised by how consistent it all is, how consistently thin and unargued and contorted and ad hoc and uncompelling. So – when a fresh example turns up, I tend to add it to the pile. It has a shooting fish in a barrel aspect, I suppose, but I don’t really care, because clerics do get a hell of a lot of unearned deference and attention and credence, they do get their voices heard on abortion and stem cell research and ‘family values,’ they do get seats on ethics committees despite a total lack of expertise and even ability to think clearly, they do have a wildly disproportionate ability to tell people what to do – so however easy it is to keep saying ‘Why should we believe that?’ I think it’s worth doing.FT: Have you ever been religious, or believed “implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons” (to use your own pithy phrase)?
OB: No, not really. Not since childhood anyway, when what I did couldn’t really be called believing, I just took in what I was told (which was rather vague in any case). I detested Sunday school and wasn’t made to go for long (in my memory it seems to be no more than twice, but I’m not sure that’s right). I also loathed church, and we didn’t do that much either, and not at all after I was about 8.
I feel as if I really ought to come up with at least one implausible belief, because it seems so conceited to say no. I’ve had silly political beliefs – I used to be way too uncritical about underdog nationalism (the IRA, other separatist groups, that kind of thing), for instance – but I can’t think of any big implausible factual beliefs. That can’t be right; I must have had some; you’re welcome to assume that I’m flattering myself. But I can’t think of any. That’s not because I’m so damn clever – I think it must be more a matter of temperament. I think I’m just not much of a believer in general, by temperament. (Which perhaps means I ought to be kinder to priests and imams, who have different temperaments, which is not their fault. All very well, but they lay down the law in public, so the rest of us get to push back.) I’m a minimalist about belief, I think, so odd ones don’t tend to stick to me.
FT: How would you describe your personal philosophy?
OB: I’m not sure I really have anything as grand as a personal philosophy – I think I have more of a methodology. It could be boiled down to not wanting to be taken for a sucker, or in more philosophical language, to a dislike of bullshit. I hate dishonest manipulative language of all sorts, and I spend a lot of time sniffing it out and then making fun of it.
Read the rest of the interview.
I admire the idea of fighting against "dishonest manipulative language." A worthy pursuit that will never be exhausted, especially with the rise of blogging.She is essentially coming from a scientific, rationalist viewpoint, and looking at the postmodern and relativist worldview on one hand, and at the mythic and religious worldview on the other hand, and rejecting both as not fully rational. But she seems to be selective in her appraisal of each (though I suspect a more blanket rejection is her overall view), picking worthy targets for her attack.
Here are a couple of examples of her views. First up, a shot at the claim by Hillary Clinton and her supporters that being First Lady qualifies her to be president.
Why is it supposed to be 'feminist' to think that being a first lady does qualify you to serve as commander-in-chief? What the hell is feminist about that? What is feminist about thinking 'I am married to an important man' is a qualification? That's not feminist, it's anti-feminist. Feminist is running on your own merits, not someone else's. Parlaying wifehood into a career is not my idea of feminist. Using family connections and second-hand fame is not my idea of feminist. Riding on coat-tails is not my idea of feminist. Clinton is doubtless qualified, but the nepotism question makes her one of the last people in the country who should have tried for this particular job. I don't feel one bit 'empowered' as a woman by the fact that another woman is trying to use her marital arrangement as an elevator to the top.Can't say I disagree with that.
Next up, a look at "honor killings" in the Muslim "faith."
Again, she's spot on correct -- it's unbearably horrible that this happens ANYWHERE on this planet.What honour is - something that makes it not only acceptable but actually praiseworthy to stamp on, suffocate, and stab to death a 17-year-old girl who is your daughter, a girl who hasn't killed anyone or hurt anyone but has simply developed an affection for a male person.
It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand's two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.Oh, god, it's so ugly I can't stand to read it. I can't stand it I can't stand it - this world where men get together to murder women then treat them like garbage then spit on them. It's so ugly. The hatred, the contempt, the disgust - for a young girl - their own relative. It makes me crazy.
I've just began reading this blog, but I'm looking forward to seeing what she's about here. I'm hoping that she doesn't lump all worldviews that aren't hers into the same category -- wrong-headed -- and so far it seems she makes some distinctions.
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