1. On Fitna, the Movie

Comment #179586 by Ophelia Benson on May 13, 2008 at 12:15 pm

"Yet I don't hear a PEEP out of you when 8 young Muslim women burn to death because they aren't properly covered, or a father murders his own daughter for having a crush on an English soldier. Where's your anger THEN?"

Wait, wait, you don't seem to know who Maryam Namazie is - she's an atheist, she was Secularist of the Year a couple of years ago, she fled Iran after being thrown into prison there, she worked for women's rights in various places after leaving Iran. There was a lot more than a PEEP out of her about various outrages of the theocrats in Iran. She's one of the founders of The Council of British Ex-Muslims for chrissake! She's one of the most vocal and courageous opponents of Islamism you could find.

2. Archbishop's 8 March centennial message: Let Sharia Law govern women's lives, Amen!

Comment #129582 by Ophelia Benson on February 19, 2008 at 10:45 am

Several people wondered why they haven't seen Azar's work before or where they can see more. I've published many articles of hers at Butterflies and Wheels.

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articles.php

3. George Scales, War Hero and Generous Friend of RDFRS

Comment #111738 by Ophelia Benson on January 15, 2008 at 4:10 pm

Thank you for your support, Mr Scales, which benefits all of us. Very best wishes for a rapid and resounding recovery.

Picture an enormous bunch of freesias here, with a hummingbird perched on one stem and a Monarch butterfly on another.

4. Islam's Silent Moderates

Comment #95212 by Ophelia Benson on December 7, 2007 at 3:15 pm

There is one moderate Muslim who is quite keen to speak out here -

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=287

Gina Khan does speak out, and she's working on getting more people to join her.

5. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82124 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 5:51 pm

Oops - thanks Jack. I'll just pretend I meant to do that - especially since I'm always resorting to that 'how come we can't say God doesn't but you can say God does?' retort.

6. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82097 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 5:01 pm

There are very sophisticated theological arguements that God exists. You can't just say God exists without dealing with all those sophisticated arguments, you know. They're really sophisticated. I don't know what they are, but they're way way sophisticated. You have to show why all of them are wrong first, then you can say God doesn't exist and we can say we know in our hearts he does.

7. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82096 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 4:59 pm

Whether God exists or not, don't say God doesn't exist, because if you do, a Republican will get elected president in 2008. Matthew Nisbet says so, and he should know.

8. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82094 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 4:58 pm

Lots of scientists believe in God, you know. Lots and lots. Michael Behe is a brilliant scientist. Isaac Newton got his science from God. Look at Aquinas - he was no fool.

9. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82092 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 4:56 pm

God has been around a lot longer than you have. People have believed in God for thousands of years, so who are you to say they were all wrong? Some very very smart people have believed in God, so what makes you think you're better than they are? How can you be so sure you're right and they were all wrong? When there were a lot of them and some of them were very smart and it's been such a long time?

10. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82089 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 4:53 pm

Atheists are metaphysical naturalists, and there's no philosophical justification for that. If it's metaphysical, we can't get at it, so it's not subject to empirical testing; therefore God exists. Or God might exist. Or you can't go where God is and find out that she doesn't exist, at least.

11. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82087 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 4:51 pm

Atheists are arrogant, therefore God exists.

12. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82085 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Science deals only with the natural world, but we have no knowledge of what lies beyond the natural. Humans are puny creatures, after all, and God is ineffable, mysterious, beyond our ken; we simply can't begin to approach the outermost suburbs of the realm where God is. We can't possibly ever ever ever know anything at all about God, except of course that he exists. Oh, and that he's a he. But other than that, we know nothing, nothing, nothing. So you arrogant atheists should be humble and unassuming.

13. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81865 by Ophelia Benson on October 25, 2007 at 10:10 am

The metaphor defense.

You atheists are so literal. Religion is metaphor. God is no more a person than my left foot is a carrot. (See Terry Eagleton in the LRB for the classic recent offering in this vein, including citation of his own left foot.)

Why do you atheists hate metaphor so much?

14. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81346 by Ophelia Benson on October 24, 2007 at 3:52 pm

People aspire to freedom and light, but they also need obedience and shadows. (That's Roger Scruton, in his review of Anthony Grayling's book on the Enlightenment.)

15. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81341 by Ophelia Benson on October 24, 2007 at 3:50 pm

Scientists talk about evidence but who decides what is evidence? Science won't accept personal experience as evidence, but it should. People who've experienced God know that God exists; people who don't accept that simply haven't had the experience, so they aren't qualified to evaluate it.

16. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81338 by Ophelia Benson on October 24, 2007 at 3:47 pm

Dawkins thinks science can answer all questions, but science can't tell us why we're here or what is the meaning of our lives.

17. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81337 by Ophelia Benson on October 24, 2007 at 3:45 pm

Science can answer how questions but only religion can answer why questions.

18. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81336 by Ophelia Benson on October 24, 2007 at 3:45 pm

Atheists claim to know what they can't know, whereas religion is all about uncertainty; atheists are the real dogmatists.

19. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81333 by Ophelia Benson on October 24, 2007 at 3:43 pm

We can't possibly know either way, therefore the only reasonable thing to be is an agnostic; atheists are just as dogmatic as theists. (Actually of course we think they're much more so, but we pretend to think it's a toss-up between them, for the sake of appearances - but we do of course spend a lot of time ragging on atheists and no time ragging on theists.)

20. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81328 by Ophelia Benson on October 24, 2007 at 3:38 pm

One that keeps getting recycled: 'you can't prove God doesn't exist [therefore God exists].'

There is also the bottomlessly silly 'You can't prove love exists, either [therefore God exists].'

Expanded, that turns into the endlessly irritating pseudo-argument that criticism of 'faith' as a way of thinking amounts to an attack on imagination, story-telling, art, love, beauty, truth...happiness, laughter, walks on the beach, and Christ knows what. We see this a lot of course in the oh so witty riposte that Dawkins can't prove he loves his wife. Bleah. People were using that on Carl Sagan more than ten years ago, and it was just as stupid then. One, there's the endemic confusion between evidence and proof, and two, there's the absurd idea that God is the same kind of thing as a particular human emotion - that all 'unseen' things are the same kind of thing, and stand or fall together. Pu-leeze.

21. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: abandoned to fanatics

Comment #77456 by Ophelia Benson on October 9, 2007 at 11:06 am

Infidel is a brilliant book. (I reviewed it for a future Free Inquiry.)

This situation is an outrage.

22. Against the grain: There are questions that science cannot answer

Comment #72508 by Ophelia Benson on September 21, 2007 at 10:36 am

The really really really irritating thing about this is that Midgley isn't just ignoring common knowledge, or RD's corrections of misunderstandings in general - she's ignoring criticisms of *her own article*, RD's included.

Jeremy Stangroom wrote a good article on Midgley's misunderstandings at Butterflies and Wheels:

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=1

23. Bible Belter

Comment #68213 by Ophelia Benson on September 6, 2007 at 11:20 am

I once had a televised encounter with a leading "moderate" Muslim, of the kind who gets a knighthood or a peerage for not being an "extremist". I publicly challenged this "moderate" to deny that the Muslim penalty for apostasy was death. Unable to do so (the Koran is word-for-word inerrant), he wriggled and twisted, and finally claimed that it was an "unimportant detail", because never enforced. Tell that to Salman Rushdie, of whom the knighted "moderate" had earlier said, "Death is perhaps too easy for him"

No need to be coy - that's Iqbal Sacranie, of course. It's common knowledge that that quotation belongs to him.

24. Honest Mistakes or Willful Mendacity

Comment #68184 by Ophelia Benson on September 6, 2007 at 9:58 am

"Does Cornwell seriously imagine that I would applaud Social Darwinism? Nobody nowadays applauds Social Darwinism, and I have been especially outspoken in my condemnation of it (see, for example, the title essay that begins A Devil's Chaplain)."

Funny you should mention it - I've quoted from that article more than once at Butterflies and Wheels precisely in disputing outbursts of windbaggery from people who insist on just this kind of misreading. Over and over and over again I have pointed out, through gritted teeth (okay on a gritted keyboard then), that Dawkins has said that as a biologist he's a Darwinian and as a moralist he's an anti-Darwinian, as was Darwin; and then I quote from that article and from the Darwin letter. But people go on and on and on making the identical false accusation. (Not that I expect them to see my efforts, but the endless recycling of a stupid tendentious evidence-defying piece of nonsense does get very irksome, to put it mildly.)

25. Good luck, Dawkins!

Comment #63844 by Ophelia Benson on August 16, 2007 at 12:12 pm

Ohnhai, maybe you're thinking of Susan Greenfield? She has at least expressed some skepticism about the value of disputing religion in the manner of Dawkins and Atkins -

"I've sat through many science-religion ding-dongs, and they strike me as a complete waste of time. No one is going to change their views. The Atkins-Dawkins stance treats science almost as though it were a religion, and evangelically try to convert other people. Meanwhile, the religious person can't articulate why they believe what they do: they just do."

http://www.damaris.org/dcscs/readingroom/2000/susangreenfield.htm

26. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62611 by Ophelia Benson on August 10, 2007 at 10:52 am

That's a subtle bit of irony or double meaning there in Richard's final remark - 'I fear, however, that I may be in for some twinges.' It could be read simply as fear that commenters will misbehave, but it can also be read as expectation that commenters will point out the obvious problems with Lawson's piece, as indeed they have.

It's all too familiar, this 'religion makes no truth claims' claim. Gould made it in the awful Rocks of Ages, and atheism-bashers keep on making it with dreary regularity. Right, religion just tells people how to be good and says nothing at all about any nice man in the sky who will give them what-for if they don't be good. Uh huh.

27. Ditching God: Emboldened Atheists Are Finding Purpose In Coming Out Of The Closet

Comment #57923 by Ophelia Benson on July 22, 2007 at 10:37 am

Well now this is an eerie feeling - as of being lost in a hall of mirrors or similar. I'm typing this comment at the original Center for Inquiry itself, the one in Amherst (just outside Buffalo, New York, and across the street from SUNY Buffalo), in the brief time before I go to the airport to return home from CfI's summer conference 'Beyond Belief,' at which I gave the keynote address. The building is quieter than I've known it in two and a half weeks (apart from one evening when I was here until 9), because the conference is now over, but it was humming before. We had lunch with CfI (and CSICOP, Skeptical Inquirer, Free Inquiry, etc) founder Paul Kurtz on Thursday, along with Joe Hoffmann and others.

Good luck CfI Ontario.

28. Egypt mufti says female circumcision forbidden

Comment #52642 by Ophelia Benson on June 27, 2007 at 3:35 pm

Peacebe,

Ohh, cutting, right. Beg pardon. No, it didn't cause offence!

29. Egypt mufti says female circumcision forbidden

Comment #52582 by Ophelia Benson on June 27, 2007 at 10:45 am

Right, what we can do on this site is change the subject from something that happens to women to something more minor that happens to men. Always a good idea.

30. Egypt mufti says female circumcision forbidden

Comment #52565 by Ophelia Benson on June 27, 2007 at 9:41 am

Yeah, what Gordon said. We cross-posted. FGM is not comparable to male circumcision and it's pathetic when discussions of FGM get yanked into moans about male circumcision. Jeez. It's like whining about a splinter to someone who has an axe sticking out of her back.

31. Egypt mufti says female circumcision forbidden

Comment #52559 by Ophelia Benson on June 27, 2007 at 9:27 am

There is no FGC, it's FGM. It's not circumcision, it's mutilation. The most extreme (but also most common) form cuts the clitoris off entirely along with most of the labia majora, the remains of which are sewn shut. It's extreme mutilation, NOT circumcision. However agitated you are about male circumcision, please don't minimize FGM.

And ain't it the truth about the hijacking; I was just thinking that, with considerable exasperation, when I reached the comment that said so. It is unfortunate. This particular piece is about FGM, not about men and their dicks!

32. Journey Into Islam

Comment #52554 by Ophelia Benson on June 27, 2007 at 9:12 am

"each of us (Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu) must connect with others and live out our convictions for our common humanity in the face of tribalism, religion and other dividing forces."

Each of us: Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu; note how the religiously-inclined are taken to exhaust the possibilities.

33. Is this another Sokal Hoax?

Comment #31184 by Ophelia Benson on April 11, 2007 at 9:21 am

It's quite a funny idea, actually - that 'a few pages cut and pasted from the middle of any 600-page work...would become cryptic' - as if it were a physical phenomenon, rather as one might say 'the middle of any 600 mile walk through a desert would cause dehydration.' She makes it sound inevitable, automatic, part of natural law. But no, Professor Guertin, no; you have free will, or the illusion of it, which comes to the same thing; you have intentionality, you are a quantum feminist, you can decide. It is not up to The Fates or the cosmos or the laws of motion whether or not the middle of your book becomes cryptic; it is up to you.

To put it another way, and speaking as one writer to another: you can write well and clearly, or you can write badly and obscurely; it's your choice. It's no good blaming the length of your own book for its obscurity.

34. Happy 50th Birthday to PZ Myers!

Comment #24814 by Ophelia Benson on March 8, 2007 at 5:53 pm

Oh, honestly, PZ - I mean happy birthday and everything, but honestly, I'm so jealous I could spit. Even though I did inspire a Jesus and Mo once, which was the high point of my life, and you were kind enough to be jealous of that - but all the same. Honestly. I'm such an unbecoming shade of green.

Happy birthday, ya bastid.

35. The problem with secularism

Comment #14692 by Ophelia Benson on December 24, 2006 at 11:26 am

A lot of people have called this pair philosophers. They're not philosophers! I see Blond lectures in philosophy; but he isn't himself a philosopher.

He was on Night Waves (BBC 3) last year some time, along with Norman Levitt and Julian Baggini - I'm pretty sure he was introduced as a postmodernist theologian. You know: like Theo Hobson.

That kack they talk is not philosophy, it's more like anti-philosophy or unphilosophy.

36. The Only One in Step

Comment #14689 by Ophelia Benson on December 24, 2006 at 10:58 am

Someone asked if the Steve Fuller, sociologist, Warwick, who wrote the inane letter to the Guardian accusing RD of urging Leeds to 'silence' McIntosh and pointing out that Oxford isn't 'silencing' RD for openly promoting atheism - if that Steve Fuller is the same Steve Fuller who testified (so hilariously and gratifyingly without success, in fact Judge Jones cited part of his testimony among his reasons for deciding the other way) at Dover - oh yes. Oh yes, that's the same Steve Fuller all right. You betcha. That 'silencing' trope was a big part of his testimony at Dover.

There's a useful (if I do say so myself) collection of material on and by Fuller at Butterflies and Wheels

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/infocusprint.php?num=30&subject=Steve%20Fuller

There's also a very nice collection of comments on the Dover decision at B&W. Richard is the first person I asked for a comment. The other responders are Daniel Dennett, Paul Kurtz, Steve Jones, Matt Ridley, Barbara Forrest (who testified for the prosecution), and Susan Haack. It's a fun read.

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=162

37. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #14197 by Ophelia Benson on December 21, 2006 at 1:05 pm

That's just silly. Of course we don't worship any mere mortals, we worship A, than whom there is none greater.

38. The Blasphemy Challenge

Comment #14162 by Ophelia Benson on December 21, 2006 at 10:25 am

It's also rather silly - actually very silly - for Dembski of all people to whinge about finding an email he sent to Dawkins published by Dawkins, when Dembski published emails Daniel Dennett sent, not to Dembski, but to Michael Ruse (who sent both sides of the exchange to Dembski, without Dennett's knowledge or permission). Surely Demsbski gave up the right to consider his own emails confidential when he published someone else's to a third party without permission last spring. He's a hypocritical bugger, isn't he.

39. Christmas Present to Defenders of Darwinism

Comment #14003 by Ophelia Benson on December 20, 2006 at 3:32 pm

It's quite extraordinary that Dembski is complaining that his email has been published here. Dembski himself published Dan Dennett's emails to a third party (Michael Ruse, who sent both sides of the exchange to Dembski without Dennett's permission) last spring, without Dennett's permission. I know that because I asked all three parties about it for an article I wrote for The Philosophers' Magazine. Ruse admitted he hadn't asked Dan's permission, Dan said he hadn't given it, and Dembski said - well, nothing that I ever received. I asked twice, and got no reply. Perhaps Dembski replied with a sincerely apologetic embarrassed explanation that he'd simply - er - forgotten his manners; and the reply somehow got lost. Twice. Or perhaps he just never answered.

Either way, frankly, he has a considerable nerve.

40. Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

Comment #2451 by Ophelia Benson on October 21, 2006 at 10:00 am

I did a couple of posts on this at Butterflies and Wheels last week -

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1613

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1614

It's an irritating review. I particularly disliked his saying "For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief" and then promptly making a lot of flat evidence-free assertions like "God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design". Where's the honest doubt in that? How does he know that? What's his evidence for it? And if he has no real way to know it and has no evidence for it, in what sense does reason play "an integral role" in his belief?

41. The Need to Believe

Comment #1162 by Ophelia Benson on October 10, 2006 at 8:47 am

"But the problem is, when you advance a case rooted in the supposedly disinterested scientific discourse that insists God probably does not exist, then flam it up so that God becomes a ludicrous and contemptible conceit, you undermine the basis of your argument."

Nonsense. Both can (quite easily) be true - it is not possible to prove that God does not exist, and God is a ludicrous and contemptible conceit. It is not necessary to prove that X does not exist in order to argue that [the existence of] X is a silly idea. It is also not possible to prove that Odin does not exist, or that Diana of the Ephesians does not exist, or that Bugs Bunny does not exist; it is nevertheless quite possible to argue that it's silly to think they do. Funny how it's always this 'God' fella who gets the benefit of the doubt while all the other imaginary playmates who might exist, don't get that benefit.

42. Collateral Damage 1: Embryos and Stem Cell Research.

Comment #264 by Ophelia Benson on September 24, 2006 at 8:43 am

But more seriously -



One wonders how much of a role habit plays, along with religion. War (and capital punishment) are long-established habits, whereas stem cell research is a novelty. People who don't have a habit (oh look, there it is again) of making an effort to think carefully about habits such as war and capital punishment and other established customs tend to assume that they are smiled on by the deity (otherwise, why would we have been doing them all this time?), while secular novelties at the hands of those suspect people, scientists, are a whole different kettle of fish, and need to be looked at with great suspicion, which then ought to become settled hostility.



That's a rather rude account, but I'm afraid there's a lot in it. Or maybe not, maybe it's only Bush who thinks that way.

43. Collateral Damage 1: Embryos and Stem Cell Research.

Comment #263 by Ophelia Benson on September 24, 2006 at 8:37 am

But of course all this is secular reasoning, and therefore beside the point.

44. Judgment day

Comment #200 by Ophelia Benson on September 23, 2006 at 9:46 am

'When sophisticated believers claim disarmingly that "we don't take Genesis literally any more," he rails "That is my whole point!"'