Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist - The F.S.A.

The Dover Decision is expected some time today!!!!!! More to come.

[UPDATE]
Victory!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It looks like it's gonna be another sporadic week. Things have been so busy lately. I've been taking work home with me and I'm still struggling to get things done. On top of that, I haven't been able to work on my blog at all. I started this blog to help with my writing skills and also it's been pretty therapeutic being able to post about a variety of topics. It's really frustrating, but until my workload lightens up or we get more hours in the day, I'm not going to be able to post as much as I would like.

Another idea that I've been mulling around is starting another blog. I'm realatively new to the blogging scene and I've been searching around on technorati to see blogs on other topics. I've taken a keen note of personal finance blogs and I'm even thinking of starting one. Maybe what I will do is start an atheist personal finance blog or something of the sort. It's just like me to try to think of more things to do even though I don't have time to do everything right now. We'll see.

Until then, I leave you with another quote:

Becoming an atheist is the best thing that has ever happened to me [franky]

What, I said I'm swamped at work, what do you want!

TRA has a great post up entitled: Message of Christmas Marred by Violent Santa Displays. It is hilarious, I've posted it below, but please go and check it out:

New York, New York, December 13, 2005Special to The Raving Atheist
A holiday display outside a Manhattan brownstone depicting a bloody-bearded Santa holding a knife in one hand, and a severed doll's head shooting blood from the eyes sockets in the other, has provoked anger from parents who fear the gory display will traumatize their children.
The outrage is the latest in a series around the nation, including one last week in Miami beach in which a blindfolded Santa was hanged from a tree, a noose around his neck and his arms and legs bound with wire.
"Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of a sweet baby, sent to earth to be beaten, whipped, scourged and impaled on a cross with rough spikes splintering the bones of his hands and feet," said Donna Rossi, the mother of two. "Why are they trying to destroy the meaning of the holiday by exposing our kids to brutal executions involving mythical characters?"
"This is blasphemy," agreed Father Thomas Mallory, standing in front of an icon of the Virgin Mary miraculously shooting blood from her eye sockets like a South American horned lizard. "The gentle Yuletide message, for which Christ's flesh was flayed and pierced so that we all may now wash it down with His blood at Communion, is not served by these unholy displays."
The owner of the Manhattan exhibit, Joel Krupnik, claimed that he was merely protesting the commercialization of the Christmas season. "The moneylenders must be cast out of the Temple," he said. Scoffing at this excuse, Rossi suggested that she wouldn't be surprised if an angry, violent mob "decided to teach that crazy Jew a good lesson."

On another note, how do I enable trackbacks for my posts? I'm too lazy to do the research right now. Thanks

I'm going to be posting sporadically this week. I have a lot of stuff to do at work and I'm transitioning to a new area in my job as well, so it's like I have two jobs...sort of. I'll try to cross-link interesting articles and/or posts, but I wouldn't expect anything substantiative from me unless I get struck my inspiration (i.e. procrastination). Thanks, and remember:

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. [Mark Twain].

I've seen this in a couple of different places. Sam Harris's Atheist Manifesto. Good reading from Harris again.

Ok, I'm just going to post a response before I see it somewhere else again. I've been seeing this news article being posted on left-leaning blogs and some atheist blogs as well. I've responded twice and I'm just going to post those responses so that people can just come here instead of me copying and pasting all the time. The Article in question is this one: Is Bush the Worst Pres Ever. The article lists a bunch of different things to support it's claim and one of them is

He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;

I'm going to post my comments with a little editing to make them more readable. Also, I'm attaching a graph that shows US GDP growth and the circle is around the recession. Here are my original comments: comments.

When Bush took over as president, the economy was going strong, however, there were problems (can we say tech bubble). Then, 9/11 hit and we had a recesession. This lead to two things, the Fed lowered interest rates and the government cut taxes. This was a good thing for the economy and the result was a fiscal and monetary stimulus that many say caused the recession to be short-lived. As a result we ran up a large deficit. In the short-run, that is ok, because we needed a stimulus. However, in the long-run the deficit will strangle US growth. So think of it that we had some bad times and we had to run up our credit cards to keep going. Now that we’re back on our feet, we need to start making some minimum payments.

In order to get the deficit under control, we need to either raise taxes or cut spending. As a Republican president, Bush is doing what others (Regan) have done before him: run up a deficit and then claim government is too big we need to cut spending. What would be more prudent is to do a combination of cutting spending and raising taxes.

So, we did have a recession, but it was short-lived. The cuts were for everyone, the middle class received cuts as well.

I am not denying that the cuts created the deficit. What I am saying is that the cuts were justified at the time. Yes, the military spending is also a significant contribution to the deficit.
This is the Republican formula. Run up a large deficit and then claim that we are in a budget crisis, Government spending is too large, yadda, yadda….we need to cut spending. It’s the same tired old trick. Could Bush had handled the recession differently, yes. Would it have been better to curb spending and cut taxes rather than one or the other, yes. Is it politically easier to just cut taxes rather than cutting spending (at least initially), yes. These factors are the reasons why there were tax cuts.

Going forward the tax cuts need to either be revoked or spending cut drastically to get the deficit manageable. So we shouldn’t just wail at the tax cuts incessantly, we should try to talk about them more rationally.

Finally, here is the graph of GDP:

I just wanted to point out a the blog on my blogroll The Anonymous Liberal . While not an atheist blog, it's well written and I've enjoyed reading it. He/She has an entry titled "Why I'm Agnostic" . Very informative and discusses the Catholics getting rid of the concept of Limbo. Take a quick gander, it's worth it.

Here is a great quote from Jon Stewart:

Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion.... perhaps around their necks? And maybe - dare I dream it? - maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.

Brilliant

Article: Onward, Christian shoppers
Interesting article from the Economist. Check it out.

This weekend I saw portions of Bruce Almighty again. Funny movie, and Jim Carrey is his usual self. This was the second time that I've seen the movie, the first time I saw it I was a theist, this time I'm an atheist. I still enjoyed the movie, but this time I saw it for what it truly was, an exercise in Christian apologetics. There were many different aspects of faith dealt with in the movie, but the largest one seemed to stem around free-will. One memorable quote from the movie is when Bruce askeds God (Morgan Freeman):

Bruce: How do you make somebody love you without affecting free will?
God (Freeman): [scoffs] Welcome to my world, son.

This raises some serious questions of consistency in the movie. The movie makes it clear that God cannot alter our free-will, but at the same time, he is omnipotent. As such, he was able to grant everyone's prayer and several thousand people choose the same lottery numbers. How is that not changing their free-will? Wouldn't you have to alter their wills in order to get so many people to pick the same numbers? Then there is mention of people's stocks tripling in five days. The stock market is made up of people. These people engage in buying and selling based on a variety of factors. In order for a stock to go up, people have to want to buy it. If the demand for the stock exceeds the supply, then the stock goes up. So in other words, people's will would have to have been manipulated to some extent to get the stock moving. These are the two most obvious contradictions as I wasn't able to watch all of the movie again.

As some of you are already aware, I am already of the mindset that free-will and omnipotence are mutually exclusive and things like this cement that notion in my mind. I promise that I'll try to get a fully fleshed out free-will post later on. I have it somewhere in my head, I just need to get it down.

Article: Jesse Jackson on Wall St
I hate Jesse Jackson. I'm black and I cannot stand him. This article is one example of why I can't stand the guy. He makes this blanket statement:

Jackson cited the U.S. mutual fund industry as an example. He claimed that in an industry that manages about $7 trillion, 'all the blacks and browns combined manage $5 billion'. [emphasis mine]

This statement is a blatant lie. As someone that works in the industry I am appaled that he's making shit up. Don't believe me, go to this website: Earnest Partners. This is a company in Atlanta, GA managing and advising on $15 billion of assets and guess what, the CEO is black. So with one company, I have come up with more than twice the number of assets that he mentioned.

It's shit like this that I can't stand. He's just like O'Reily and other idiots on TV that make up their own statistics to get their point across. It doesn't even matter if you agree or disagree with the point they are trying to make, but the fact that they are dishonest about it lends absolutely no credibility to them at all. Please Mr. Jackson, either shut the hell up or get better facts next time. Thanks for playing, but you're not helping the situation at all for us "brothers" out there. (PS I hate the term brothers and was just using it for effect)