Conversation with my son(s) #1: Why don't we go to church?

This series will be a weekly (hopefully) endeavor where I will imagine some hypothetical conversations with my boys when they grow older. Hopefully they will prove insightful. Not too sure on what the format is going to look like, but I'll tweak things as I go along

Son: Hey dad, can I ask you a quick question.

FSA: Sure son, what is it?

Son: Um, well I was just wondering, why don't we go to church?

FSA: Why were you wondering that, if you don't mind me asking?

Son: Well, some of my friends were asking me at school. They were talking about going to church and stuff, and they asked me what church I went to. I told them that we didn't go to church and that we just stayed at home, but I figured I'd ask you why.

FSA: Ok, fair enough. You see son, church is for people that belong to certain religious groups. It's for people who more or less believe the same thing and every Sunday they meet to talk about those set of beliefs and be part of a community of like-minded individuals.

Son: How come we don't go?

FSA: Simply because we don't share one major belief. I'm an atheist, and your mother is a...hmm, spiritual agnostic is the best way to put it.

Son: What does that mean?

FSA: (laughing), for me it means that I don't believe that god exists. For your mom, she's not really sure if god exists, but she tends to believe that there is a spiritual realm to the world...or something like that, you should talk to her and get her thoughts on the matter.

Son: What does that make me then?

FSA: Well son, most likely it'll make you either an atheist, or an agnostic. Most kids usually follow their parents when it comes to religion.

Son: I thought grandma and grandpa were Christian though? Why aren't you a Christian then dad?

FSA: That's a long complicated story, son. Suffice it to say that I took a look at the evidence and it lead me to atheism.

Son: What do you mean by that dad?

FSA: That's going to be a conversation for another time son. I promise we'll get to it though...we could go to a church if you wanted to see what it's like. Maybe we could go to different congregations and we'll talk about what we like and don't like.

Son: Do you think that would be a good idea?

FSA: It's just a thought. I'll talk to your mother about it and see what she says. We might go to a Unitarian Universalist church first and see what they're like.

Son: Ok...what's a Unitarian Universalist?

FSA: I wish I knew son, but we'll figure it out together. (wink)

Son: (laughing) Ok dad, if you say so.

FSA: I love you son.

Son: I love you too dad.

~Fin

So that end's the first of what should be a weekly series. In this short conversation, I wanted to touch on how my sons might feel like an outsider because of our familiy's lack of religion. I hope that I'll be able to do a better job explaining to them, while at the same time allowing them to explore and be their own person. I'll try to refine the format and improve upon the dialogue going forward.

Tax Cuts (again with the tax cuts)

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: