Via Shiraz Socialist, the Freethinker carries a great interview with Ophelia Benson, my editor at Butterflies and Wheels.
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?
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.
There’s some interesting stuff on how Ophelia’s book was published:
Freethinker
Is it true that your upcoming book, Does God Hate Women?, was turned down by the first publisher because in was too critical of Islam?
Benson
Yes, a publisher did turn it down for that compelling reason. It wasn’t exactly the first publisher since it never actually accepted it, but it was very interested, got Jeremy [Stangroom, the co-author] in to have a chat etc (I live six thousand miles away or I would have gone along for the chat too, whether they’d invited me or not) – then said they’d decided no because one mustn’t criticize Islam.
Freethinker
How did you feel about that at the time?
Benson
A mix of amusement and disgust, I think – amusement at the docile predictability, disgust at the crawling. I also felt even more convinced that the book was needed, precisely because a publisher would turn it down for such a reason. What publisher, you wonder? Verso.
As Shiraz says: ‘Verso, the great left wing publisher describe themselves as putting out ‘Books with a critical edge’. Except about religion, or a religion, of course.’
