Article at Butterflies and Wheels

Yesterday's blog post, on the idiotic and dangerous concept of "defamation of religion", has now been republished (with my permission) as an article on Ophelia Benson's wonderful Butterflies and Wheels site.

If you're not familiar with Butterflies and Wheels, please check it out. It's a marvellous resource, which is best explained here. To quote the explanation in part:

Butterflies and Wheels has been established in order to oppose a number of related phenomena. These include:

1. Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated.
2. Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games).
3. Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.

I have no difficulty in giving those aims my full endorsement. In fact, they correspond quite strongly with some of my own aims in my writing since 1997 or so, when I began to publish fairly prolifically about related issues. That includes my aims in producing this blog.

Whenever I visit Butterflies and Wheels, I learn a great deal, especially from the articles by Edmund Standing, Tauriq Moosa, and others.

Ophelia Benson is one of the many excellent writers who have contributed essays to the Voices of Disbelief book that I edited with Udo Schuklenk last year, and which is now finding its way through the publication process (Udo and I expect to see page proofs in the next month or two, and publication is currently scheduled for September ... at the moment I'm chipping away at some preliminary work for the index we'll be expected to prepare). I see that Ophelia has a new book coming out soon, written with Jeremy Stangroom: Does God Hate Women? That should be worth watching out for.