Who is this Big Franky guy?

About me...

I am a registered republican and have a fairly conservative bent on most social issues. Though I can be considered a bit moderate on some economic issues. Although I am conservative in my general ideology, I try to be respectful of others views and I think that differences should be celebrated... I think the political climate in this country is vehemently divisive...and that is too bad, because in an environment like this people don’t listen to each other, they just talk AT each other (as opposed to talking TO each other)... and nothing ever gets done.

I’m not one of those mindless drones that go into the voting booth and simply vote for the party. I know people that will go down the line and simply vote republican or democrat instead of weighing the issues. I am certainly open to voting for someone like Barack Obama, someone whose ideals are more in line with my own. Someone who could very well be considered a breath of fresh air. Just because he is not aligned with the same political party as me doesn't mean that he can't be a good President, at least in my opinion. I take the candidate’s ideology, morals, and stance on particular issues into consideration. Unfortunately, I think that is not the norm in our country right now. That being said, I do hope that Rudy Giuliani runs for President. That way, if those are the two candidates, I feel that the country is in a win-win situation, since I like both candidates and I can relate to both of them.

I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand in junior high school. It was fairly definitive in shaping my explicit philosophy, giving coherence to my values and beliefs. Obviously, a lot has happened since then. Though I did spend a good deal of my high school experience immersed in Objectivism and arguing it with people around me...most of whom treated it dismissively. I did become a bit critical of it during undergrad but still MOSTLY accepted the tenets of its philosophy until my early twenties, when I began to find flaws in its treatment of free-will and in the behavior and attitudes of the philosophy's’s major proponents. I considered myself a “small o” objectivist until around 25 when reading several books by Stephen Pinker on evolutionary psychology caused me to reevaluate some of the core tenets and decide that the primary axioms of the system (in my opinion) were flawed.

At that time in my life, I started taking the Bible much more seriously, which also changed my viewpoints on the theory dramatically... anyways, my faith in God never waivered during those weird years of me finding myself, which was a struggle in and of itself to balance the objectivist view without being an atheist. But I never really took the Bible too seriously until my mid 20’s hence the objectivist in me beginning to waiver at that point in my life. Of late, I have been considering hashing out the details of my own perspective with an eye towards formalizing it at some point into a written work. But the realist in me recognizes that this will never happen for 2 reasons: (A) I know that I am way too lazy to ever follow through with such a project; and (B) I'm not an idiot... nobody would care. It is funny though to think that those of us that think we have a lot to say doesn’t necessarily mean that others want to listen!