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Brian Sorgatz
(rhymes with “cats”)
Arcata, Humboldt County, California, United States
What sort of man blogs about Playboy? I flatter myself to think that Kendra Wilkinson might call this blog intellectual pimping.
To see what I look like, click here.
ISFP “Composer Artisan.” Culturally and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. The rabbit in the avatar is not mine. I stole the image from the House Rabbit Society home page. Favorite activities: reading, writing, crosswords, Jeopardy!, moviegoing, television (and proud of it), piano, didgeridoo, foreign languages (currently Spanish), light hiking, spiritual practice, friendship, sex.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
Bill Maher’s guerrilla documentary Religulous is pretty much what I expected after reading his article in the July 2008 Playboy, in both its strengths and its weaknesses. Not always but often, religion is ridiculous. Maher chooses some highly deserving targets for his mockery of the excesses of religious fundamentalism: creationist theme parks, ex-gay ministries, and all the symbols of peace that somehow keep turning into banners of war. But by smearing everyone who believes in God as part of the problem, an “enabler” or “Mafia wife” of the dangerous crazies, he needlessly alienates someone like me.
Atheists with more intellectual vigor than Maher, such as Steven Pinker, acknowledge the philosophical wiggle room that still exists for a debatable Supreme Being of some kind. Nor is this a “God in the gaps” of present scientific knowledge, to be debunked when the eventual facts come in. Pinker is humble enough as a scientist to remember that philosophy necessarily precedes science, because the scientific enterprise is structurally incapable of bridging some of the gaps. Some arguments for the existence of God have respectable intellectual nuance. If anti-intellectualism is what makes fundamentalism such a threat in the first place, let’s stick to the subject.
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:48 PM
Shea left this comment at November 24, 2008 2:48 PM
