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Ophelia Benson is an author, editor and blogger.

Benson is the editor of the website Butterflies and Wheels and a columnist and former associate editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. Benson is also a columnist for Free Inquiry.

Her books and website express her desire to defend objective 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".

Background
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.

Published works
In 2006 Benson co-authored two books with Jeremy Stangroom. The first, Why Truth Matters, 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". The other, The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense, 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 2009 Benson co-authored Does God Hate Women?. with Stangroom. The book explores instances of 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.

Interviews

 * Interview with 3:AM Magazine, 31 January 2007
 * Interview with Point of Inquiry, 20 July 2007
 * Interview with Little Atoms, 1 September 2006

Reviews

 * "Nonsense in vogue", by Phil Mole, Skeptical Inquirer, May–June 2005 (review of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense)
 * "The truth? You can handle the truth", by Johann Hari, Independent on Sunday, 14 May 2006 (review of Why Truth Matters)

Category:Living people Category:People from New Jersey Category:Year of birth missing (living people)

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