Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson
Benson at CFI Women in Secularism conference, May 18, 2012
Born	United States
Residence	Seattle, Washington, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Writer, editor, blogger
Website	butterfliesandwheels.org freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels (formerly)

Ophelia Benson is an American author, editor, blogger, and feminist. Benson is the editor of the website Butterflies and Wheels and a columnist and former associate editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. She is also a columnist for Free Inquiry.

Her books and website defend objectivity and scientific truth against the threats to rational thinking posed by religious fundamentalism, pseudoscience, wishful thinking, postmodernism, relativism and "the tendency of the political Left to subjugate the rational assessment of truth-claims to the demands of a variety of pre-existing political and moral frameworks".

Benson was born in New Jersey and attended university in the USA before working in a variety of jobs, including being a zookeeper for several years, before becoming an author.

In 2004 Benson co-authored The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense with Jeremy Stangroom. It is a satire on post-modernism, modern jargon and anti-rationalist thinking in contemporary academia. The Times Literary Supplement said "With wit and invention, Benson and Stangroom take us through the checklist argot that so often litters postmodern texts."

In 2006 Benson and Stangroom published Why Truth Matters, which examines the "spurious claims made for creationism, Holocaust denial, misinterpretation of evolutionary biology, identity history, science as mere social construct, and other 'paradigms' that prop up the habit of shaping our findings according to what we want to find".

In 2009 Benson co-authored Does God Hate Women? with Stangroom. The book explores the oppression of women in the name of religious and cultural norms and how these issues play out both in the community and in the political arena.