doG

Hearsay evidence is not credible support for your position. Can you cite something more authoritative and verifiable?

Directly answering the question posed by the OP with my opinion is not hijacking a thread.

Proof please. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!

I challenge you to support that. You can start with your proof that there are any gods at all.

Neither. You will turn to dust like all other dead and buried bodies. There is ZERO evidence that any heaven or hell exists.

You're not stating any case. You're making an unfounded, unsupportable claim. I might as well state my case that my Unicorn killed your god and stuffed it in a Leprechaun's pot.

So your are saying this collection of planetary data from NASA is wrong then? I challenge you to support your revelatory claim.

Another claim with no support? Do you happen to realize that some planets like Venus and Mars have no magnetic field at all? A hammer and a feather fall at the same rate on the moon. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6926891572259784994 Is the hammer getting a magnetic assist to keep up with the feather here?

I'll bet you can't support that claim.

Is that a fact? Can you support that claim?

That was directed at me and I chose not to report it since it might have been deleted and I'd prefer it remain as a reflection of the member that posted it

Strawman Strawman I take it those questions were a little too hard for you?

See Conservation of mass:

Belief has nothing to do with knowing. I don't know if there is a god or not but I do know that I have no belief that one exists. My lack of 'belief' makes me atheist, a weak atheist in particular because I do not make the claim there is no god. It does not mean that I 'believe' there is no god but if I did I would still be atheist, just a strong, or positive, atheist as opposed to a weak one. Additionally I 'believe' the truth about the existence of a deity is unknowable so I am also agnostic. What's unfortunate is that the term agnostic never meant one believed or disbelieved in deities, only that one believed the truth about the existence of deities, or lack thereof, was ultimately unknowable to man. Over time people that lack belief in god without believing there wasn't one started looking for something to call themselves besides 'atheist' and started using the term agnostic as a label for a place in the middle. The truth is that theist and not-theist, i.e. atheist, is really a binary position that is either on or off, there is no in between. It is easy to see this when you examine the requirement to be theist and you learn that one MUST believe, not know but believe, in at least one deity to be theist. Everyone else is not theist and that's all a-theist really means.

Side note to mod: Is this side discussion on atheism off topic? Should it be cut out to another thread? Actually nontheist does mean atheist, a negative atheist but atheist none the less: Atheism ranges from those that claim there is no god, a small subset of the group, to those that simply lack belief. Those that simply lack belief are usually open to the possibility that there may be a god but have no reason to believe in one without further evidence. There is no position between theist and atheist. One has a belief that there is at least one deity or they are atheist. Yes, agnostics claim there is no way of knowing but knowing and believing are two different things. Agnosticism is about the belief that you could ever know the truth or not, not about the belief in existence.

From Wikipedia:

Sure but understand, agnostic is not a shade of theism. Regarding theism you are theist or you're not. Agnostic simply means you believe the truth is unknowable and has nothing to do with your belief that there are god(s) or not. It is not a position between theist and not-theist.

Or pigs flew....

Speech recognition is a growing software industry and some of it has been implemented in Win7, see http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Set-up-Speech-Recognition FWIW, I would see this more as an application than an integral part of the OS.

I modded some systems where we cut of some of the pins from the bios at the case to render it dead, soldered a socket on there piggyback and plugged in our own eprom. It was a popular mod on TV descramblers at one time when C band satellite dishes were common.

You can when the OS is made into the bios on the motherboard. See SplashtopOS. My ASUS netbook has this and my boottime to a browser window from power on is about 8 seconds. As an aside, when running splashtop I do not have access to my hard drive or other peripherals because the OS is scaled down to fit in the bios. It's great though when I hit a cafe and just want to hit the web for a few minutes.

Not really. By using the scientific method we can test the theory of gravity. Without understanding exactly what it is or how it works we can still drop a million objects and watch them fall to the ground. Never in the history of my own existence have I unexpectedly floated off the ground. I have good reason to believe that there is some reason for this. A belief in one or more deities is different. There is zero evidence for any deities. They are born completely from man's imagination. There is nothing to support their existence as a cause for anything. I do not profess to have a belief that the existence of deities is not possible but I equally have no reason to believe with affirmation that they do.

IMO, no. If you're not theist then you're not-theist. Yes, there are shades of theism and atheism but in the end all of the definitions I can find for theism require that one MUST believe in one or more gods to be theist so anyone that doesn't meet that is, IMO, not theist. Sure. I don't know how gravity does it but I'm sure it will hold me down and I'm not skeptical of that at all. I don't know if there is a god and I believe it to be unknowable so I'm agnostic. I'm not sure there is or is not any gods and I lack any affirmative belief that their existence is a fact so I'm atheist. Since I've seen no evidence to support any position conclusively I am also a skeptic. Thanks, that's one of my favorite banjo pieces.

If Al Qaeda supports lopping off the heads of those that don't support them should that be OK? What if they support stoning women that are raped by someone other than their husband? Beans are good, beheading is bad, stoning people is bad too!

It doesn't need to equal "not existing", it needs to equal existing to meet the minimum requirement for theism. One doesn't need to believe there are no gods to be atheist but one does need to believe in one or more gods to be theist. I do not see how "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" can be construed in any way to indicate an affirmative belief in one or more gods and I can find no definition of theist that allows anything less.